


Chaos is the Prize

by TeethHunter



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst, Assisted Suicide, Child Death, Descriptions of Violence and Gore, Eventual Romance, F/M, Minor Original Character(s), Multi, Raven adopts Ruby, RoseGarden, Ruby does Bad Things in this one, Ruby goes feral af, Ruby has a ways to go, Underage Drinking, it's gonna take a bit to get to the romance, like so much angst y'all be warned, parental neglect
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 32,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22654300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeethHunter/pseuds/TeethHunter
Summary: Ruby breaks.She runs far, and runs fast, and runs right into Raven Branwen.Given an offer, a chance to grow stronger, to be part of the tribe, she takes it.Years pass and an old friend finds her, and helps her find herself.
Relationships: Oscar Pine/Ruby Rose, Raven Branwen & Ruby Rose
Comments: 46
Kudos: 200





	1. Grimm Don't Bleed

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is rated M for heavy subject matter, not for sexual content.   
> If you have any triggers, please do check the tags before going further.

Ruby is covered in blood. It isn’t hers.  
It dries to a rust brown on her red outfit, standing out more as it clings to her. 

Grimm don’t bleed.

Her scythe is a deadly weapon, it cuts through monsters with such ease.  
As it turns out, it cuts through flesh even easier. 

Things didn’t go as planned, not at all. There was no talking down a man who was drowning in fear and hellbent on doing what he was sure was right.  
No amount of hope can save him.  
Ironwood held a gun to her head, and she cut right through him.  
The blade of her scythe slows when it reaches his prosthetic from the inside. The sound of metal cutting through metal is more sickening than the smell of blood splattering over her. If she closes her eyes, she once again sees Penny in the arena, torn into metallic bits. 

She stares down at him as he collapses, dead before he hits the ground.  
It was self defense. It was a mistake. It was completely justifiable.  
Time stops, it stretches, it snaps.  
She holds her breath and feels nothing.  
She takes a breath and runs and runs and runs.  
She takes a train to anywhere but here, and runs some more. 

Unsure of where she was, or how much time had passed, Ruby finally let herself feel.  
The air was warmer here, than in Atlas. The woods were much more like home, yet nostalgia was no cure at the moment. There are no Grimm here to take these terrible feelings out on, so she slashes through trees instead. The feeling of cutting through wood was not nearly as satisfying, but at least it was far enough removed from the feeling of cutting through flesh. 

A black bird perches high in a tree, watching. It flies from tree to tree, choosing a lower branch each time, getting closer. Ruby doesn’t notice it, not until it lands on the ground not more than ten feet from her and stands as a woman. 

Ruby stops mid swing. 

She didn’t know Raven, not really. She had only met her once, otherwise she was as much a ghost living only in a photograph as Summer was.  
It was painful to look at her, she looked so much like Yang it only reminded Ruby of what she was running from. 

There’s no judgement in Raven’s eyes, but mild curiosity. Here stood Summer’s daughter, a girl who Raven saw as having that same sickening hopefulness as her former teammate. Yet the girl had a wild look in her eyes, with blood crusted to her, hair standing in all directions, trembling with an animosity Raven could understand. 

“Want to hit something that can put up a fight?” Raven breaks the silence, hand on the hilt of her sword. 

Ruby says nothing, a lunge forward in a burst of petals was all the answer needed. 

Her first attack was blocked, as was her second, and third. It was frustrating and satisfying all at the same time. 

“You fight like my brother, and you move like your mother. You’re predictable.” Raven says, mid block. 

Of course she did, Qrow had been her mentor, and she was very much her mother’s daughter. Still, if she could think straight she would almost appreciate the blunt critique. 

Ruby hasn’t been following through on her attacks, not truly. On some level afraid of cutting through another person. 

When Raven moves from simply blocking to attacking, that changes. The last bit of restraint Ruby gave way to the torrential wave of anger and resentment she had been biting back all her life.

Those feelings ebbed and flowed. Raven let Ruby tire herself out as Ruby shifted from furious and sloppy slashes, to cold calculating attacks over and over again. 

In the end Ruby only gets a handful of hits in that actually connect, doing no real damage with Raven’s aura up. 

Ruby was left gasping for air as Raven sized her up with a considering look.  
“I won’t stop you, if you follow me.” Raven said, turning her back to Ruby and walking away. 

Ruby follows.


	2. Sleeping with Wolves

In the tribe, everything you get is earned. 

That’s Ruby’s first lesson as she’s stopped by Raven just inside the campsite.  
She points to a threadbare blanket on the ground, more than half taken up by a pile of five sleeping giant dogs, or maybe they were wolves, they sure were big enough to be.   
“That is where you will sleep for now. Want a better spot? Fight for it. Want food? Find it yourself.” That’s all Raven says before heading further into the camp, disappearing into a crowd of whispering tribe members.

Ruby looks at the blanket, and at the dogs, and approaches cautiously. Only one of them wakes, looking back at her with a huff before tucking its snout back into the huddle.   
She sighs, wandering over to the creek that they had passed on the way here, running just along the edge of camp. She begins to wash the blood off her skin with the cool water. Rehydrating the blood only brings back it’s acrid smell. 

Ruby gags. 

She kneels to cup water in her hands and pour it over her blood crusted hair.   
The creek turns a pink hue.   
She heaves but there is nothing in her stomach so all she is left with is retching noises echoing off of trees.   
It’s dark when she gets back to camp. She’s shaky and has no desire to sleep even as she sits down on the empty corner of the fabric.  
Her eyelids are so heavy though, it is impossible to stay awake.   
The dogs slowly incorporate her into their pile which makes it hard to breathe but at least she’s warm.   
Sleep is thankfully dreamless that night. 

Ruby wakes to something jabbing into her arm.   
The dogs aren’t surrounding her anymore.  
She groans, not quite remembering where she is yet. When she opens her eyes, three sets of eyes are staring back at her. Three children surrounding her, staying a cautious distance away. One holding a stick gasps and jumps another couple feet away. They are surrounding her like she is a viper they are teasing, trying to provoke a strike but at the same time afraid to get bitten. 

“Umm… hello?” She waves at them, unsure.   
The three children look at each other, as if silently asking each other what to do. The girl off to the left, oldest and sturdiest looking of the bunch finally speaks up.   
“Are you a wolf?” She asks loudly, near a shout really. 

Ruby frowns, tilting her head in confusion. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t the last time I checked, and I’m not a faunus either, so I think the answer is definitely no.” 

None of the kids look too sure of that. “Tuck told us that you turn into a wolf, an’ you’d eat us if we got too close.” The girl off to the right with a squeaky little voice and just a scruffy tuft of hair explains.

Ruby has no clue who Tuck is, or why they were telling these kids stories, but she can understand why children would believe it. Their leader can literally turn into a Raven afterall. 

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that.” She chuckles, sitting up properly with a stretch and yawn. “Who are all of you?”

The three of them shrug. “I dunno, we’re just us, we don’t got names yet.” The boy who was holding the stick says, he’s nearly as skinny as a stick himself, Ruby notes.   
“You don’t have names?” She repeats back. 

“Nope.” Says the boy. “Haven’t earned them yet.” 

Odd as that was, it seemed fitting for what she knew of the tribe. 

A distant but audible whistle made the children freeze, looking at each other once again before taking off running towards the sound. 

Ruby shrugged to herself, standing slowly and trying not to wince from how her muscles ached. She doesn’t see Raven approach, and nearly trips over herself at the sound of a voice just behind her. 

“It’s time for training, follow me.”

Ruby barely has time to grab Crescent Rose before Raven is off. She follows on her heels, through the maze of tents. She can feel eyes on her, knows she’s being sized up, but thinks it might be a bad idea to make eye contact with any of them so she just stares at the ground.

She’s brought to a dirt clearing, an impromptu fighting ring of sorts.   
“Put your weapon down, you won’t be needing it today.” Raven says simply.   
Everything in Ruby wants to argue, or whine. She hates hand to hand combat even if she has improved in it. 

She sets her scythe down just outside the ring and is met immediately with a foot to the face. This was less training and more of a public beating, as it turned out. Ruby can hardly pick herself back up before she’s kicked back down again and again. 

“You aren’t even trying.” Raven goads.

“I am trying! You aren’t giving me a chance!” Ruby snaps back at her, getting a fist to the stomach for that. 

“Your enemies won’t give you a chance either. They will look for your weaknesses, and they will take what they want. Your life, your eyes, your dignity. It’s theirs for the taking.”

Ruby gets one punch in before her wrist is caught and twisted. She yelps. 

“Show me you are worth your weight. Or should I kill you now to spare you the pain later?” Raven asks, chillingly sincere in that offer.

She winds Ruby one more time, leaving her flat on the ground. Unceremoniously ending the fight.   
Ruby eventually pulls herself back to her feet again, more sore than she was before, with a wounded ego but a surprisingly clearer head. 

She gets back to her sleeping spot and feels her stomach gnawing at the inside of her ribs, for once not nauseous but rather starving. 

She doesn’t know what plants are edible around here and even if she did, the forests were empty of fruits this time of year. Hunting is her next best option at this point. 

It’s a bloody affair, but it seems that the past two days have made her numb to it. She doesn’t know how to hunt, not really. She knows how to kill Grimm, and how to fight, but hunting for food is a different skill altogether. She learns how from watching how the dogs hunt. She watches the pack of them, their light footsteps and the way they circle their prey before picking the right moment to pounce. 

She copies them. 

Maybe she really was turning into the wolf the children thought she was.


	3. The Conditions of Love

Love is conditional, it always has been. 

Before, the condition was that Ruby be an ever positive spirit and give people around her hope.  
Here the only condition is to be strong.  
This condition seems more obtainable, or at the very least less likely to slowly make her crumble from the inside out. 

Each day Ruby gets up and is soon met by Raven for the day’s training. It consumes her time and energy. She stops counting the days.  
She doesn’t know it yet, but for Raven to invest so much time into her means much more than she could understand.  
It makes her the focus of interest to everyone. Her training becomes everyone’s daily entertainment. 

Raven doesn’t tell her what she needs to correct. Pain is a better and more memorable teacher.  
Ruby had thought Qrow was a strict mentor, he had pushed her, but at least he also corrected her and praised her and let her take breaks.  
Maybe he only ever seemed strict because all she had to compare to was her father who refused to even teach her how to throw a punch while he was busy teaching Yang how to brawl. 

Raven never asks if she’s okay, never slows for her to catch her breath.  
If Ruby is capable of standing back up, she is capable of fighting some more.  
She is constantly in pain, and frequently gets frustrated, but the heaviness in her chest always feels a little less by the end of the day. 

The day she holds her own for more than a few minutes is the day she realizes that she had never had anyone treat her with this much respect in a fight.  
Closest was probably professor Ozpin who was perfectly comfortable launching new students off a cliff. Who– if he hadn’t needed to worry about not breaking a completely untrained Oscar in the process– probably would have been a terrifying hand to hand combat teacher. 

The sparring she and Oscar had done was fun too, but it was just two children play-fighting with each other, she realizes now. 

She learns that if she ever wants to win, there is no honor in battle. There is a lot more honor encoded into the lessons of a huntress than she ever realized before.  
Fighting dirty means she stays on her feet, even if only for a few extra seconds.  
The better she gets, the easier all other aspects of life get.  
She has more free time. She can actually eat properly, and rest, and explore a little bit. People stare at her still, with neutrality or even mild interest instead of disdain now. 

The children have made a game out of following her around from afar, watching her. She pretends she doesn’t see them and lets them play.

The day she manages to get Raven on the ground is the day she is offered a more substantial bed than the blanket with the dogs. 

That reward paled in comparison to the way seeing the slight upturn of Raven’s lip in some vague notion of approval makes Ruby feel.

Still, a mat was much better than the cold ground. 

The dogs follow her to her new bed, and no one stops them.  
She was welcomed into their pack long before she will truly welcomed into the tribe.  
They keep her warm and keep the nightmares away and in exchange she offers them the scraps and bones from the animals she’s caught. 

Suddenly she has more time to observe, and more energy to focus. Training isn’t any less intense, she just gains the ability to withstand it. 

Love is conditional, but it does exist here.  
Hidden between blustering words and tough exteriors, there is a deep kinship that Ruby doesn’t quite know the rules of.  
They have ways of caring for each other in actions rather than words, but the actions themselves were hard to catch and even harder to describe.  
Slightly larger portions of food are given to those recently ill, the younger ones are given reasonable expectations, they still know how to hunt and fight, and they never cry when they are hurt, but their duties match their size. 

Speaking of the children, they grow bolder each day in how close they get to her. None of them have spoken to her since her first morning here, but they watch her and talk about her, and giggle. They might not have names, but she’s mentally given them ones. The older girl who is all muscle and doesn't seem to know how to speak quieter than a soft yell, she calls Bull. The boy, who seems thinner now even than when she first met him, she calls Stick. The little girl, youngest of the bunch, she calls Squeak. 

They have a name for her too. She hadn’t realized that no one here refers to her by name, most here probably don’t even know her name. Much like them, she supposes, she hasn’t earned it yet.

“Hey wolf girl!” Bull calls to her, the other two try to hush her up, starting a small scuffle between the three of them.  
She wanders over to the children who are all too busy fighting each other to notice her approach.  
They all look a bit startled by that, if she could knock down Raven even for a second,then she was dangerous, they were sure of it. 

“Oh uh, are you going with the party tonight?” Bull asks, just a touch quieter showing her caution.

Ruby has no clue what that question even means. 

“We heard Tu- I mean someone, say that someone else said that you were maybe ready to go. So are you gonna go?” 

Ruby blinks blankly at them, shaking her head. How long had it been since she’d actually spoken with someone? 

“No?” She tests out her vocal cords just to make sure they still work. “No, I’m not.” 

The three all look a little disappointed at that, and just like last time, before she gets the chance to ask anything, there’s a whistle in the distance and the three of them take off. 

How strange, she has so much she still doesn’t understand about life here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got some scenes in mind that are still a ways out but that I'm so looking forward to writing. Tbh I'm getting really loving writing Raven and Ruby interacting and figuring out how to develop that particular dynamic. Let's just say Ruby has a lot to learn about the Branwen Tribe's idea of mercy...


	4. The Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Btw this takes place in same world as my other fic, One Hundred Breaths. You don’t need to read it to understand any of this but it does give more context to Ruby and Oscar’s relationship.

Ruby learns later the next day what ‘going with the party’ means. 

The dogs are nowhere in sight. That isn’t too unusual though.  
What is unusual is that Raven hasn’t shown up for training.  
The camp is quiet, and much emptier than usual. 

She isn’t sure yet what exactly is going on.  
She is even less sure of what to do now, so she waits a bit longer.  
Proper free time is a foreign concept to her now, and the silence was biting at her in the back of her mind.  
She feeds herself, and washes up, but the longing for the routine of training doesn’t leave.  
Her days have been consumed with the present. All her thoughts are about when to dodge, where to hit, how to balance herself properly.  
Thinking about the past is a luxury she isn’t used to anymore, or maybe it’s a torture she had been spared from until now.  
Being well rested, having this calm, still environment lets sickening emotions creep back up around her.  
If she doesn’t pull away, this feeling wind its way around her throat and squeeze until she’s consumed.  
She is choking on nothing but reflection and guilt.  
She thinks of her team-

She had promised Weiss that team Rwby wouldn’t leave her side. Well, at least Blake and Yang can keep that promise. 

She thinks Blake might understand the choice Ruby has made.  
Maybe.  
Hopefully.  
It doesn’t matter. 

She thinks of Yang, but the tendrils of terrible emotions strangle her quickly. She can imagine so clearly that sincere worry and confusion, that disappointment that is more of a mother than a sister. 

She can’t breathe. Thinking of her team hurts too much. She moves on. 

She thinks of team RNJR, of the three who lost a teammate and still willingly followed her into hell. 

Jaune knows what it’s like to be a leader, the demand to always have a plan. She’s pretty sure if she told Jaune that she had killed someone, he would offer to help her hide the body with no questions asked. But– she knows if she didn’t smile bright enough, if she let any of her despair slip through the cracks, he would feel obligated to help fix it. She would feel obligated to pretend it worked. 

Ren and Nora, impossible to think of one without thinking of the other. Though she thinks they might have diverging opinions on her now. Nora wouldn’t judge, she takes the world in stride and understands impulsive decisions. Ren would probably quietly disapprove. 

Maria would probably whack her with her walking stick, ask no questions, and move on. That almost made Ruby smile to think. 

Penny wouldn’t understand. She loves Penny, she still has so much pride in being her first friend. She is still so new to the world of human emotions though. She would listen with a smile, and try her very best to understand, but how could she understand these feelings even Ruby had no words for? 

Oscar would understand. That still baffles Ruby completely. He seems to know implicitly when she needs someone else to be the positive one.  
He got a glimpse of the terrible storm lying just under the surface of her cheerful, shiny exterior, once. 

And he didn’t flinch.  
And he didn’t try to fix her.  
He saw that grotesque side of her  
And smiled  
And called her amazing  
And helped her to her feet. 

She doesn’t know if she’s more afraid that he might judge her, or that he won’t. 

Then last there was her dad and uncle Qrow.  
They both had been so concerned with Yang meeting Raven– why?  
Because they thought the two were too similar?  
Because they thought Raven could steal Yang away?

Ruby didn’t see the similarities beyond what was skin deep. 

Dad and Qrow were so busy worrying about Yang that they never once considered it’d be sweet little Ruby Rose that would be entranced by Raven’s ideals.  
They would be so confused.

She is choking.  
It wasn’t fair.  
She couldn’t breathe. 

Why did she have to keep pushing forward when her dad couldn’t get out of bed to take her to her first day of school?

Why did they expect so much of her when by the time she was five, she knew the smell of old alcohol meant to grab a cup of water and some aspirin for uncle Qrow?

Why were they allowed to collapse and she wasn’t?

She started counting her breaths.  
No.  
She stops.  
She lets herself choke, it almost looks like she’s laughing.  
No one here would stop her, that’s all she needs. 

She reaches out for Crescent Rose. Her weapon that once felt like such a comfort to her now felt odd in her grip. She hadn’t used it since she got here. The caliber of sniper ammo wasn’t good for hunting small animals; it left them more a pile of splattered goo than edible meat. 

There is a strong wind blowing through the trees but she hardly feels it as she stands and swings her scythe at nothing, relearning how to balance herself with it.  
She starts counting breaths again, compulsively. She has to stop herself several times.  
She owes no one a calm or happy demeanor.  
She has nothing to prove right here and right now. 

Using her weapon doesn’t distract her well enough. She tires so much slower than she used to. It’s infuriating. 

She drops Crescent Rose to the ground with no delicacy, uncaring.  
Her fingers curl into her palms, her nails nearly puncturing her skin. She punches a tree.  
It’s not much, but if she hits hard enough then her knuckles ache. It gives her the physical feedback that she’s craving.  
The ache in her chest doesn’t lessen, but she can breathe again.

As her shoulders relax, she notices the children are watching her again. 

Stick stood out, so pale and unusual looking, he didn’t bother to hide.  
Squeak is the most well hidden, in her dark clothes and with her tan skin, she is small and easily blends in with the trees.  
But it is Bull with her loud voice that really catches Ruby’s attention. 

She glances in their direction, but plays along as if she doesn’t notice them.  
She kneels to pick up her scythe, retracting it, and turning back towards camp. 

There’s a quiet pattering of feet behind her, clearly experienced with moving through the forest quietly, but also not bothering to be entirely steathy. 

“Hey girl!” Bull yells.  
Ruby turns and offers just a raised eyebrow as acknowledgement. 

“Wolf girl!” She yells, and apparently that was just what they call her now.  
Ruby stops, letting the three catch up to her. 

“Let us see your… your uh- gun- blade- stick thing.” Squeak demands, manners are much different in the tribe. Please was not a word they used. 

Ruby’s lips curl up just slightly. “You mean my scythe?” 

“Yeah, that thing,” Squeak gestures to it, nodding. 

She gives the three of them a considering look. She had always hated other people messing with her weapon. She finds she doesn’t feel so attached now. 

With a click, Ruby unhooks it from her belt, extends it, and triple checks that the safety is on. The kids know what a gun is, but they didn’t seem to be commonly used around here. Giving them a high impact sniper rifle seemed like a bad idea.

She holds it out, and it’s Stick who grabs for it. It topples out of his grip immediately, almost taking him down with it. That doesn’t surprise Ruby, the weapon probably weighs more than he does. The other two tease him for it, which starts another squabble between them all.

They might all know their way around blades and lances, but Crescent Rose is designed specifically for her weight and height, it won’t work well for any of them.

It makes for good entertainment though, a good distraction, watching them try it out. Eventually they hand it back to her, but demand she shows them some of how she uses it. She’s pretty sure there’s some tribe rule about not rewarding them, but the stubborn faces staring back at her nearly make her laugh, so she gives. 

Four strides backwards, and a boost upwards using her semblance, she kicks off into a spin. It’s sloppy from lack of practice, but she still easily gets her foot on the stop right by the blade, and pulls the trigger to send herself higher. She lands, and the children are impressed by the showmanship of it all. They are used to practical fighting, nothing flashy. 

They want to see more, but once again a whistling noise from afar halts them. They look at each other then turn tail to run towards the sound.  
This time Ruby follows. She doesn’t run like they do, she has no sense of urgency about it all. They stop finally at the other end of camp, where there stood a scrappy looking boy– older than they were but still no older than twelve.

“Hey Tuck… uhhh what’s up?” Bull asks, strangely meek and quiet. All three were staring at the ground, deferring to this boy. 

The older boy, Tuck, gives them a stern look.  
“You were supposed to be on guard duty, when the party is out, we protect the camp. Where were you?”  
None of them say anything, they shift uncomfortably under his gaze. A long stretch of silence is broken by him punching Bull right in the stomach. She doesn’t guard, or fight back, or make a sound. 

All at once the tension is gone and quietly they all go their separate ways to patrol.  
Ruby could only be a bystander, and so she chose to walk the border of the camp as well.  
Squeak falls in step with her for just a moment, whispering. “Tuck got his name last summer, but he doesn’t get to join the party yet.”  
Ruby nods, and asks nothing. Adulthood was a very different thing here, it seems. 

Later, when the sun begins to set, the rest of the tribe emerges from the surrounding brush. They hold many bags of different items, all piling it in the center of camp. 

Ruby realizes then what the party is. This is a tribe of raiders after all, they raid towns. 

She doesn’t touch any of the stuff. The thought still makes her a bit queasy.  
She doesn’t think she’s allowed any of it anyways. She slinks away from the crowd and back to her sleep mat. The dogs are back, that helps some, they are happy to see her at least. 

She sits, staring at nothing for a long time, one hand buried in the fur of a dog’s side. It is dark when Raven walks up to her, and dumps a handful of items in front of her, walking away wordlessly.  
She still doesn’t touch the things for quite a while, but finally gives in.  
There are clothes in her size. Her outfit was getting torn and unwearable no matter how much she tried to mend them. Along with that there is a knife with a sharp edge and a good weight, as well as a few books. 

She stashes it all away under her mat, and lays down.


	5. Chill

The nights are growing longer, and the air, more brisk.  
A week later they pack up camp and leave.  
Resources in this area have been depleted, it wouldn’t last them the winter. 

Ruby has very little to call her own, but she is still handed a hefty pack to move with her. 

One nice thing about traveling is she doesn’t have to worry about feeding herself. Food is shared during the trek. Stew, jerk, and various root vegetables were a whole lot better than her haphazardly put together meals of unevenly cooked meat and whatever plants she was fairly sure wouldn’t kill her.

Everyone seems in good spirits as they travel. She doesn’t talk much at all, but she listens to the stories people tell, and the arguments they get into.  
They sing songs that sound so very familiar to Ruby, yet she can’t place them for the longest time.  
It was only one day, when she hears Raven humming along that she remembers someone whistling that same tune to her when she was very little, any time she wouldn’t go to sleep.

Days pass, and nights around the fire are when flasks come out and the stories get wilder and more boisterously told.  
It puts her on edge at first, she doesn’t particularly like the smell of booze and she definitely doesn’t like all these people being more impulsive and less predictable. 

Somehow seeing Raven participate made Ruby relax a little.  
If Raven was comfortable enough to let her guard down that much, it must be okay.  
Or maybe it relaxes Ruby because Raven’s drunk laugh is very much like Uncle Qrow’s.  
Either way, she was eventually able to enjoy the evenings. 

A flask is pressed into her hand on more than one occasion. She shakes her head and passes it onto the next person. 

One night they tease and prod at her until she rolls her eyes and takes the smallest sip just to appease them. It was terrible whiskey and she already knew she hated whiskey, she didn’t need more proof by tasting this stuff. She scrunches her nose, and tries not to wince at the bitter burning taste of it. 

Everyone around gets a laugh out of that. 

The day they arrive at their new temporary home, it snows.  
It’s an ugly kind of snow, mixed with frozen rain that churns the ground into mud and doesn’t stick.  
They don’t have to set up tents this time though. Instead their new settlement is a hollowed out small village. Claw marks and charred buildings tell her that this was one run out by Grimm, reclaimed by nature already with vines growing through cracks in walls and moss covering what used to be cobblestone paths. 

The tribe members spread out across the village, knowing somehow without words where everything was meant to go and where they each were to stay. She watches, and kicks at the spongy ground idly, trying to decide if she should just relatively dry patch of dirt to call home. 

Then Raven is in front of her. 

There is no gesture, no words spoken, but Ruby knows automatically that when Raven turns and walks away, she is meant to follow. So she follows a few paces behind, until Raven stops at one of the dilapidated buildings that used to be someone’s home.

There were already a handful of older tribe members that had claimed this building, but no one questions it when Raven pushes Ruby towards the entrance. No one says a thing about it even after Raven leaves her there. 

They don’t acknowledge her presence, they don’t look at her, or speak to her.  
She is as good as a ghost here, but she doesn’t mind it. 

The dogs find her again, but never cross the threshold inside.  
Sleep is filled with bloody nightmares without them nestled around her. She learns not to scream after the first night.  
Instead she wakes tense and shivering, and goes to where the pack of dogs sleeps right near the doorway, and sits with them. 

Routine returns, and she is thankful for that.  
It’s not identical to what it had been before. Training only lasts until somewhere around noon, instead of stretching until dusk or until when Ruby can hardly move. The leader has many things to do other than train her, now that snow begins to stick to the ground. 

In her free time, she pulls out those books she had been given after the raid- or party rather. The first is nothing special, a history of Mistral written in a slightly archaic and roundabout style. 

The second seems slightly more interesting, but it takes her actually reading it to realize it is a different version of the very same book of fairytale she and Yang had as children.  
The cover and font are different, but the stories are the same as always, every word the way she remembers it. 

The children find her during her free time not long after that.

The three sit around her, shifting impatiently like they’re waiting for her to do something interesting. 

Ruby pretends, as she often does, she doesn’t notice them. The whole time she’s just been rereading the same page of a story. 

Stick leans in, peering over the page, looking at it upside down.  
“What’re you doing?” He asks, the first one to break the silence.

“Reading.”

“Why?” He asks. 

“Because I want to? Because it passes time.” She isn’t sure how else to answer that. 

“By starin’ at a bunch of paper?” 

Ruby looks up at him finally, then glances to the other two, and blinks. “Do you know how to read?” 

They all shrug or shake their heads. She doesn’t know how they became part of the tribe, or how old any of them even are, she realizes, but it isn’t as if they go to school. 

That is how she ends up offering to teach them how to read. Her spare moments are now more consumed with trying to figure out how to be a teacher of any sort. She hadn’t ever been a great student herself, if she found something boring it had always been impossible to force herself to read.

Progress is slow, and often interrupted by them getting summoned by the sound of a whistle and being set off on some task. But, they seem to enjoy it, and it makes Ruby feel like she’s doing something worthwhile. 

That feeling is muted by a visit from Raven a few weeks into the lessons. She has a stern look on her face when she speaks to Ruby, but Ruby is used to that by now.

“Don’t coddle them,” Raven warns.

Ruby tilts her head. “I don’t.” 

“You do. Don’t coddle them, don’t reward them for being mediocre. You only weaken them in the end,” Raven’s eyes narrow. 

“I…” Ruby’s mouth is open but she doesn’t know what to say, even more thrown off by Raven putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. 

“If you want to teach them, then teach them, but don’t spoil them and don’t get attached,” 

Ruby shivers at the smile Raven gives her. It’s a knowing and uncomfortable smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used to think I was only capable of writing fluff but apparently that's not the case...  
> This is all not beta read btw. I edit at I go but I'm also kind of screwing around writing style here so ehhh.  
> Let me know what you think of that by the way!  
> I've been trying to match the observations and sentence structure to how Ruby is doing in the moment. So if she's panicking, sentences are short and somewhat repetitive.  
> If she's calmer, the sentences have more variety but still vary in how blunt or flowery the details are depending on what she's feeling or recently been through  
> At least that's my intent. Like I said, let me know how that's working for you.


	6. The Meaning of Mercy

Snow falls heavier now. It sticks to the ground, then rain falls and forms sheets of ice, creating layers that Ruby’s feet crunch right into. Every step brings snow and ice up to mid-calf. 

In quick succession, the party comes and goes several times. They bring back food in large quantities, a much bigger variety than what can be foraged. There are even spices they bring which makes the smell of cooking food waft through the whole town, and makes Ruby’s stomach growl loudly. Food is shared more freely now as it had been during the journey here. People would starve needlessly with the scarcity if they didn’t share what the party gathered. 

By winter solstice, they have to keep water in containers that freeze solid and have to be set over a fire to melt into something drinkable. 

Training sessions reduce again. First to an hour a day, then to sporadically throughout the week. Ruby rarely sees Raven now. 

The children also come to find her less often. When they do seek her out, they are quiet and the air around them stands very still. 

At first she thinks the cold simply is draining them of some energy– that the long hours of night have lulled them into some sort of hibernation. 

Exhaustion, however, doesn’t seem to be the issue because though they are silent and still, they pay her more attention than they ever had before. They cling to her words, and they concentrate, and they steal glances at each other that make the hair on Ruby’s arms stand on end. 

They stop showing up altogether. Ruby tries to think nothing of it. She does think nothing of it. Until she sees Tuck, glaring at the ground, eyes puffy and red like he’d been crying. She has never seen one person here cry. For a moment she feels as if she’s sinking into the ground. She needs to see the kids, she decides. No one monitors her movements or cares where she wanders as she peeks into the different hovels and half crumbled buildings, seeking them out. 

She finds them eventually, all three together as they always seem to be, in the warmest of the buildings in town. Something is wrong. Bull and Squeak have such blank expressions. It was warm here, yet she feels such a chill when she sees Stick, laying on a mat with blankets piled on him. He isn’t awake, but he isn’t asleep either. His eyes are open, but staring at nothing. He is having a fit, of sorts. He had always been bone-thin– stick thin– but she hadn’t noticed that he had been losing more and more weight. His cheeks are so hollow now. 

Ruby stands there until her legs are numb. She doesn’t remember moving, but she ends up kneeling next to him. The boy gets no break of lucidity, rather there are times when he seizes, and times when he seems nearly fully asleep. 

It is well past dark when Raven appears in the doorway, closing the door so quietly, not breaking the silence and not letting the cold air flood in. Ruby doesn’t notice her, not until there is that familiar and oddly gentle hand on her shoulder. She looks up then, and she knows that expression, that silent demand that she was to follow Raven. Her eyes slide back to the boy, but she stands slowly, and follows at Raven’s heels out of the building. 

Outside, in the cold air, that somber stillness is broken and Ruby sighs and deflates.  
She doesn’t want to look at Raven, doesn’t want to see what might be written on her face.  
“If you care for something weak, you are responsible for it, until the end.” Raven says, and neither of them look at each other. 

They get to the building Raven had claimed for her own, and Ruby is allowed inside. She stares downward and counts the rings in the wood of the flooring. Raven presses something into Ruby’s hand, makes her curl her fingers around it.  
It’s a cloth pouch, with something dry and crunchy on the inside, some sort of leaves it seems. 

“You cared for him, now you are responsible. Brew this, and he will pass peacefully.” Raven’s words came softly spoken. 

Ruby is choking again. Her eyes burn. 

“I can’t- that’s… no.” She tries to sound firm, but it comes out in a whimpering way. 

“He won’t survive the winter, he won’t have another painless hour in his life.” Raven points out. Her expression reminds Ruby so much of her dad, and of Yang, and Uncle Qrow, all the times they repeated to her that her mom wasn’t coming home this time. 

She looks Raven in the eyes for the first time tonight with this stubborn, burning look in her eyes.

“No. There has to be something to be done. There’s medicine or… something, anything.” 

Raven’s gentle expression drains at once into a disgusted sneer, an anger to match Ruby’s. 

“Where is this medicine? Where is this help you’re talking about? Would you make a dog suffer for weeks just for the hope you might be able to save it?” Raven spits out. 

“There’s… doctors.” Ruby doesn’t know how to answer this.  
“Where? Show me where these doctors are. In Atlas- in the clouds? And how would we pay for that? Not everyone has the pay of a huntsman, he would be turned away at the door.” 

Ruby simmers there, tense and helpless.  
“It’s not fair!” She’s yelling at the world, at the gods who chose to abandon it, at everyone and everything. 

“Nothing is fair! If you keep your head down and be strong, maybe you’ll survive or maybe you won’t. This world doesn’t care.” Raven looks at Ruby’s face, and her own expression softens slightly again, still tinged with disdain but it holds no anger. 

“Hope can be the cruelest thing you give someone. Push hope onto someone and they will suffer until their last breath.” She puts a hand on Ruby’s cheek, like Ruby is just a small child in that moment.

She waits patiently for Ruby to finally look at her again. 

When Ruby finally does, her eyes are a dull grey, sheened with tears. 

“But give a person mercy, and they are freed.” 

They stand there like that until Ruby can find her voice again. “Will it hurt?” 

“It won’t hurt more than going to sleep does,” Raven answers, and Ruby isn’t sure she believes it. Then again, she remembers that vacant look the boy had, the way he trembled. Even if this does hurt, perhaps it’s less painful than what he’s feeling now. 

…….

She doesn’t remember brewing the tea, though she knows she must have. Her body is moving of its own accord, demanding no thought of hers to take action.

She will never forget, however, the moment she walks back into that warm building holding the cup of tea. 

They know.

They know what’s going to happen, and even this impossibly thin and ill child seemed to stop seizing and gain just the hint of awareness. 

There’s no resentment or sadness in their expressions. The air is somber, still, but thankful. 

She holds the cup to his lips.  
She helps him get enough down his throat.  
She watches his eyes slip closed.  
And he is asleep.  
And he is gone.


	7. The Meaning of Mercy Part 2

The time that passes as she stands there is only marked by the hitched breaths of the two still living children. They are crying. Ruby pretends not to notice. 

When she finally leaves, she doesn’t feel the change in temperature from the almost uncomfortably warm building to the freezing cold air outside. She can see her own breath come out in misty puffs, she knows she’s standing there, but it feels like she’s watching from the outside, like she’s playing a video game and none of this is actually her. 

Raven is waiting for her, just outside. Another wave of anger at the injustice of this all bubbles up to Ruby’s throat, pulling her back to her own body. It fizzles out quickly. She is too exhausted to fuel whatever small spark of anger is still inside of her. 

“Why are they here?” Ruby waves a hand in the direction of the building she had just come out of. It’s a vague question, asked so devoid of inflection it hardly could be read as a question at all. 

Raven seemed to understand though. “They are found, they are given the chance to save themselves.” 

No one is born to the tribe.

“Oh,” For a breath that anger boils in Ruby again. “Where are they found?” She asks. She thinks she knows the answer already, just as she thinks she knows what the party does when they go out. 

“Many places,” Raven answers, patient with the questions tonight. “Send a child into this world alone, no matter how strong, and it will die a painful death almost every time. The next Grimm infested town on the verge of collapse is no more likely to take it in or protect it than the collapsed town the child comes from.” 

It’s more explanation than Raven has ever offered her. Tonight has been full of the most overt lessons she has given. Ruby searches for a rebuttal, it all still feels so wrong.

“I thought you said hope was cruel?” She says finally. 

“Hope for the hopeless, is cruel.” Raven corrects.

No one is born to the tribe, they are found and given a chance.  
They are wayward souls, lost and forgotten in the ashes of false hope that a world might be rebuilt from the remnants the gods of old left them with. 

Ruby goes to bed. The dogs follow her in this time, whining, nudging her with their snouts and piling up on her. 

She wakes to the slightest bit of sunlight, too warm and sweaty from the animals that never left her side all night. 

It is quiet now. Devoid of the normal chatter and bustling that follows the tribe, blending into one meaningless mass of noise.

She chases the only sounds she hears, some shuffling in the distance, the sound of wood piling on wood. As she nears the source, she hears the crackling and feels the heat of a fire, more present than any normal campfire. 

It is massive, and roaring. People are gathering slowly, adding more wood, merging into a crowd. Ruby joins them in their silent circle. Two members carry the body, covered in a sheet, stiff and tiny as it is. 

And it– he, is burned. 

The scent of the wood burning almost covers the smell of burning flesh. It’s still present in undertones, in the darker smoke that billows up. The fire burns all day, wood is added, and the tribe is silent. At dusk they pack up, and by night all that is left in this town is the still glowing embers of that fire. There is no practical reason to leave here in the middle of winter, yet no one seems compelled to stay on grounds tainted by the death of one of their own.

Travel, this time, is a bleaker experience.  
Ruby remembers very little of it.  
It blurs together, and in moments of awareness she isn’t able to recall how long they have been walking, or what she last ate.  
They find no empty town this time, they settle instead in a camp once again. 

The fog lifts slowly, but as winter gives to spring she comes back to herself gradually to find a soul and body not quite what she remembers. 

Training picks up again, and she is becoming a force to be reckoned with in her own right. Her speed is a gift for more than just dodging, once she knows how to hold her weight properly on her feet and how to hit with impact despite her small size. She is put against other tribe members and begins to win more rounds than she loses. 

The day comes that she is allowed her weapon to fight with again. The week that follows is more painfully frustrating than when she was first ever learning to use a scythe. She doesn’t follow through, not the way she might with Grimm. There’s still the unpleasant physical memory of what the blade cutting through human flesh feels like that makes her stutter. Raven is the only one she is allowed to spar with using her weapon.  
Having a giant sword swung at her was great motivation to properly follow through on her own end.  
She gained a new appreciation for how her weapon could be used and how much of a lifesaver it can be. She has confidence now, in how to move without a weapon at her side but she has missed her Crescent Rose dearly. 

When finally she manages to down Raven during an armed fight, it surprises Ruby entirely. Raven, however, doesn’t look surprised but rather gives her a considering sort of look with just the smallest hint of pride. 

Ruby is beaming and indescribably nervous all at once. 

Just when those nerves are forgotten, in the evening, days later, Raven has a gift for her. A mask, white and red, not too dissimilar to Raven’s own. It’s lighter, and doesn’t form quite the same shape. Abstract as it is, it almost has the features of a canine face. Ruby huffs, she supposes Raven has heard the children’s long standing theories about her just as everyone else in the tribe has. 

“You will join the party tomorrow.” Raven says simply. “Wear the mask, don’t take it off. Showing those eyes of yours to the wrong people could be dangerous.” She taps Ruby’s forehead, just between her eyes. Ruby blinks, caught off guard. “Not just for you, but for us all.” 

She has no time to say anything before Raven is gone. 

They set off early the next morning, before the sun is in the sky and before the birds begin to sing. 

The town they approach is frozen in fear. It can hardly be called a town at all, so clearly worn down by the constant need to fight off Grimm. The tribe, and the Grimm both seem to smell that fear, as they both encroach all at once. 

She knows what happens when the party goes out.  
She is wholly and utterly unprepared to be a part of it, apparently.  
It all happens so quickly, so chaotically.  
It’s hard to see out of the mask.  
It’s even harder to breathe, but that might have more to do with the oppressive sound of screams making the air too thick to draw in. 

An old man falls in front of her. She doesn’t know if it was a tribe member or Grimm that made that first strike.  
She couldn’t be entirely confident it wasn’t her who did it, with how greyed out her vision was.  
He wasn’t dead.  
He was choking on his own blood, a wet gurgling noise coming from his throat as he flailed at her feet.  
She takes aim, and shows mercy in the form of a rifle round to the skull.  
The bubbling struggling sound stops.  
The ringing in her ears mutes whatever sounds remain. 

She is running again, far away from this scene, far away from herself as she can get.

Running only seems to bring her full circle.  
Back to a town like the one she just helped to destroy.  
Back to fighting Grimm in a desperate fury like she had the day she first took a life and ran, the day Raven found her. 

It doesn’t take something good or well intentioned to eliminate Grimm. The very emotions that attract them are potent in use to exterminate them as well. Even running on shock and pure emotion she moves with a grace and calculation that it hardly seemed human.  
Eventually there are none left to emerge from shadows.  
Eventually this different and helpless looking town comes to focus in her vision.  
People are watching, from behind slightly drawn curtains and partly cracked doors.  
Slowly, cautiously they come out of hiding and approach her. She doesn’t have it in her to run anymore, nor does she have it in her to speak to say no when invited in by the owner of the general store to be given food as thanks for clearing out the Grimm. 

She deserves no thanks. 

Yet appreciation is all she is shown. The people here are jumpy and quick to startle. They apologize profusely for having no lien to give her. One woman- the wife of the store owner explains they have a huntsman that has helped before but they couldn’t keep affording his prices. This wisp of a woman mentions in whispers and with a flinching look the other ways he demanded his pay when money stopped being an option. 

Ruby deserves no thanks, and she takes no food.  
She takes nothing but the description and location of this so-called huntsman. She could hardly be considered a huntress herself anymore, but her last deed in the name of protecting people as one will also at once be her irrevocable way of renouncing the title.  
She is a huntress for one more night, and so she hunts down the monster hurting this town as any good huntress would do. 

This monster deserves no mercy, so instead he gets the sharp blade of her scythe, taking multiple hits to down him.  
The feeling of flesh being sliced by her weapon is no longer such a nauseating sensation. 

A heart of a disgusting man stops finally, and takes with it the last of her childish wants to be a hero. 

A black bird was waiting for her.  
Raven was there to take her home again.


	8. Great and Terrible

Her fleeing stunt is not addressed and not punished.   
In fact, life in the tribe is markedly different after her first time out with the party. People actually talk to her, rather than seemingly stare right through her or treat her like a new toy as they used to. Something about joining them in the raid has marked her as an adult capable of survival and worthy of passing amounts of respect.   
As the sun comes out and the days become humid, one of the dogs births puppies. All but one die, and the one that lives is a small, sickly little thing at first.   
Ruby takes it in, and cares for it.   
Raven says nothing, and simply watches from afar, no disapproval shown. She has given her lesson on death and mercy- there is an unspoken understanding that Ruby will know to face the consequences whatever they may be. 

It is given a chance, it survives.   
She is rewarded with a dog that prefers to follow right at her side even when the rest of the pack is off doing other things.   
She doesn’t name it.   
She has forgotten the worth of names. 

She goes with the party again the next time, and she doesn’t run this time. Towns like this fester with Grimm and die a slow painful death, else are extorted by unchecked huntsmen. 

This is simply mercy in another form. 

She becomes accustomed to wearing the mask, wearing it more often than she doesn’t. Her red cloak is torn and thin as cobwebs in some spots. She is entirely unwilling to part with it however, instead she uses it as lining to a new dark grey cloak. She keeps that sentimental possession close while also using this new color to blend into the dark and move unnoticed with ease. 

Many fractured moons pass, and she is coming into her own as something worthy of awe.  
Something both great and terrible. 

On stretches where the party doesn’t go out, she prowls without them. She aims not for towns then, but the demons that haunt those towns. 

She can clear an area of all Grimm with ease in a night. Their absence won’t last, they will encroach again the way they always do. Yet it offers reprieve and soothes the feeling that still twines around her throat when she is still for too long. 

Villages and travelers all throughout Mistral have names for her. People give names to what they don’t understand, what they revere, and what they fear. 

All know that if she shows up alone, she is a blessing that will rid them of what hurts them.   
Yet if she brings with her the party, it means only destruction to them. 

There are many ghost towns and burnt swaths of land throughout Mistral.   
She is responsible for perhaps equal amounts of salvation and ruin.

Corrupt huntsmen are demons too.   
They know there is a beast that hunts in the night, that kills with glee and is only fueled by their screams of anguish.   
Some say the beast cuts it’s prey open and lets it’s giant hound sucks the marrow from their bones.   
Others say it impales its targets on the branches of dried and dead trees, leaving them to rot until they topple to the ground for the rodents and maggots to feed.   
To any huntsman who asked for more than a fair share of pay, in lien or in other favors, they knew not to rest easy in the night. 

More moons pass.  
More seasons pass.   
The world has yet to end, so someone must be doing something right.  
She hasn’t thought about that in a very long time. 

When she couldn’t sleep, she went out. She was no huntress now, but she frequently hunted.   
Sleep was harder to achieve and less necessary as time went on. 

She couldn’t sleep tonight. It was too warm, she was restless, and the sound of cicadas was deafening.   
She slips on her mask, and her cloak, and quietly leaves camp.   
There are only weak Grimm around to pick off, but it’s better than nothing. With the weak ones, sometimes she likes to revert back to a more showy style of killing, more tiring, less practical than what she knows now, but also quite fun. 

This style is more twirling, staying in the air, leaving trails of rose petals, than it is actually making impact with the monsters. It makes her feel light, and makes the world around her disappear for a moment. 

That, unfortunately, means someone catches sight of her before she catches sight of them.   
One last slash, and a last weak little Grimm dead and gone. 

“Ruby?!” And oh did that one word freeze her to the spot she landed, turning her veins to ice before she could process anything else. 

She forgets sometimes, that she isn’t some phantom, that is visible, and is real.   
Even so, no one in these wilds should know who she is. That name sounded so foreign to her now she hardly connected it to herself. 

Or she wouldn’t if that word hadn’t been uttered with such disbelief and surprise, with a cracked voice between the two syllables. A voice familiar but changed too. She so desperately didn’t want to look, if she doesn’t look at him then maybe he will go away. Maybe he’s not real. 

Her eyes meet his, though he can’t know that with her wearing her mask. 

Oscar.   
Yes, that is indeed him. He is different, sure, older, but she doesn’t start cataloging differences right now  
All she knows is that face is oh so familiar and it is staring right at her.   
And she can’t seem to move. 

He is poised so cautiously, shocked but not certain himself.  
He knows all too well that there are ones out there that take the shape of others to lure and trick.  
Yet those movements, that scythe, the rose petals that still slowly flutter to the ground, that was all so hard to fake. 

“Ruby, is that you? You’re alive?” The shock and clearly held back joy of those words takes her aback. 

There are many things she never allows her mind to stray to. What her friends went on to do, and what they thought of her leaving is central to that.   
She hasn’t considered that they might all think she’s dead. She would have preferred if they all had just accepted her disappearance and pretended she never existed.   
She knows that isn’t compatible with who any of them are. Still she wishes. 

Ruby nods almost imperceptibly at his question. It is impossible not to give some sort of answer, however small. 

He takes one step towards her.   
She takes one large step back. 

A frown almost consumes his giddy grin, concern bleeds in, and he takes a half step back with his hands held up as if to say he means no harm. 

Ruby has become accustomed to a numbness that floods her when emotions and thoughts are too much. It’s always a sweet relief. She thinks often that she didn’t appreciate the Apathy for what it’s ability to create that nothingness.

She longs for that numbness right now, but it is just out of reach. Her feet will not move, and her lungs will not take in air, and her mind will not give allow her relief from this torture of facing her past. 

His patience with her is almost the worst part. He seems entirely alright with waiting for her to make a move. 

Her paralysis under his hopeful and cautious gaze slowly fades yet she still can’t run. Instead she reaches for the ribbon that keeps her mask secure. Maybe if he sees her face he will somehow be able to read on it all that she has done, and maybe he will run for himself. 

Instead his own face brightens when he sees hers. “We all thought… Ruby we thought you were gone.” He says, and there are a hundred questions left unspoken, caught in his throat when he can see something in her eyes begging him not to ask any of them. 

He does ask a question. But it asks nothing of her past or what she’s done. “Can I take a step forward?” He asks. 

Another half nod from her, and he takes a slow step, broadcasting every move he makes, like he is approaching a skittish animal. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong in thinking that. 

She takes her own half step forward, and then him again, then it becomes almost a game until they are just a few feet away from each other. 

His outfit is different, she notes, but he still has that cane at his side, and he still has the same freckles and hazel eyes. Standing closer now, she realizes she now has to look up to make eye contact with him. 

“Hi.” He mumbles when they finally pause, watching each other.

Ruby huffs. “You grew.” An odd first thing to say, and she can’t even bother to put the energy in to make it sound playful as she means it. It sounds factual and a touch annoyed. 

Oscar’s eyes widen, then crinkle, then he is laughing.   
Something in her relaxes when she sees how he bends over laughing.   
The way he had been holding himself before had made her apprehensive in a way she just now understands.   
Back, before, in Atlas, people took seemingly every opportunity they could to remind Oscar how he would simply meld into Oz, that he was sounding more like that ancient wizard every day. Seeing him laugh assures her, this is very much still Oscar, just older and changed by the ways time and experience naturally change a person. 

“It’s good to see you again too.” He manages once he gets the laughter under control. She longs so much for numbness when the genuine way his words are spoken catch her off guard. 

Her silence brings back that questioning look on his face, but he bites his tongue, knowing if he pushes he might never see her again. 

“Walk with me?” He invites, if only to ensure she doesn’t leave quite yet. 

She nods, and strides forward, next to him but not right beside him.   
They say nothing because neither know what is allowed to be said.

So they walk through the woods, and weave around the marshes, taking towards an aimless direction.  
Normally, if she walks for this long, she would run into more Grimm by now.   
None had bothered them so far.   
Normally her own emotions attract them. 

It drags on, though isn’t awkward until the end when they both aren’t quite sure how to go their separate directions, or what to do now at all. 

“W- I’ve been staying near Kuchinashi.” Oscar stutters out eventually. 

Ruby nods, considering that for a moment. “Do you know where the Glass Lake is?” She asks. It’s a beautiful spot with many ghost stories about it, as the water there stands completely still but completely clear, unlike any usual stagnant water or swamp usual to the area. It also happens to be not all too far from Kuchinashi or where the tribe has taken up 

“Oh, yeah? Yes, I mean, I know- where it is.” 

Ruby bites back the slightest of smiles, at least she can come off as cool since she can’t stutter awkwardly if she speaks so little.   
“In two nights, I’ll be there.” That is as clear an invitation as he was getting, as she doesn’t wait for a reply. She is off in a burst of petals, impossible to follow.   
He is left in the dust, but left with a promise that this will not be the last time they meet.


	9. Fireflies

Panic hits her as soon as she crawls back into bed back at camp.   
Why had she agreed to meet him again?   
What if he tells everyone else about her?  
She can’t handle seeing them all.   
She can barely handle seeing him. 

She spirals for only a minute before that numbness she had been longing for earlier finally sets in, halting all thoughts.  
She can get a couple hours sleep before daybreak. 

Time passes as fast as it always seems to now.   
For once she is glad that Raven is occupied with other things and has hardly seen her these past two days.   
She just can’t trust her own composure right now. 

She slips away from camp. While all the other dogs sleep outside, her dog –once a runt of a puppy and now as big as all the rest– insists on following right at her heels tonight regardless of her telling him to stay put. 

The walk to Glass Lake isn’t a difficult one, just a bit annoying with how warm and wet the air is these nights. There are bugs all around until the last mile approaching the lake. The sound of cicadas and chirps of crickets dies off the closer to the she gets. The only living things surrounding the lake are sparse trees, a blanket of moss, and the fireflies that hover just above the water, lighting the area and showing the crystal clear surface. 

Oscar isn’t here yet.   
Ruby sighs, fidgets, tries to not think of all the ways this could go wrong.   
She climbs a tree, and sits on one of the limbs, waiting.   
The dog whines, but takes guard sitting just below, right against the trunk. 

She waits, and it’s moments like this where she sorely misses the distraction of having a Scroll to mess with.   
There isn’t long to wait though, as Oscar approaches the lake not long after Ruby settles in.

Seeing him, the dog trots up to meet him, tail wagging, far too happy to meet a complete stranger.   
She watches Oscar veer over to the animal and hesitantly reach down to pet him. 

Grinning to herself, she takes advantage of the distraction to hop down from the tree. 

Oscar jumps, instincts taking over to fall into the beginnings of a fighting stance which quickly melts away once he sees her. 

They stare at each other, and somehow the familiar awkwardness makes Ruby more comfortable again. 

“Is this dog yours?” Oscar asks.

“Sort of, yeah. He doesn’t usually come along with me because well, he’s… not the most stealthy thing out there. He was being stubborn tonight,” She pats the dog on its head. “He’s pretty good at reading a person’s nature and intentions though.”  
It’s true, she’s known him to growl and lunge at people before she herself has any idea how terrible they are. In a way then, it helps even more to see him being so friendly with Oscar.

Another awkward pause.   
They are both sizing each other up, trying to figure out what of anything isn’t off-limits to talk about.   
A million questions still linger at the tip of Oscar’s tongue.   
He keeps staring at her like he can hardly believe she’s actually there. Like he was sure their last meeting was a fever dream, a delusion from missing someone that was long gone. 

She keeps staring at him, categorizing differences, trying to pick apart clues as to what had happened in her time away. All while telling herself she isn’t interested in knowing what happened. Her gaze eventually stops at something hanging off his belt next to the usual cane. 

“What’s that?” She asks, curiosity clear in her voice, because she already has some idea of what it is.   
At first he isn’t sure what she’s talking about, until he follows her gaze. “Oh,” He fumbles a little, unhooking it. “It’s just a hand crossbow. Nothing… nothing special really.”   
It’s small, metal, and looks pretty sturdy. Sure it’s a simple and straightforward weapon, but Ruby’s love of weapon design was something that had never waned. 

She holds out a hand and there’s a spark in her eyes, a look that Oscar apparently was still helpless to say no to. “Can I see it?” 

He’s holding it out to her before she even finishes the question. She takes it and handles it with all the respect weapons deserve. She tests the pull strength and balance of it, clearly calibrated for Oscar since it was just a bit awkward and difficult in her hands. 

“I needed a long ranged weapon of some sort and I wasn’t going to modify the cane. I think Oz would have a fit if I tried to actually… Um, but yeah, I don’t really like guns, so this is what I ended up with. I’ve been messing around with dust tipped arrows lately too,” 

Ruby looks up from the crossbow, raising an eyebrow. “So are you a good shot?” She asks, the teasing clear in her voice feels entirely unfamiliar to her now.

“Well, I think so. Maybe not as good as you, but who knows, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it,” Oscar shrugs.

“Maybe we’ll have to test that out sometime,” Ruby only realizes after saying it that she’s just implied they’d meet yet again. She nearly drops his weapon in her haste to hand it back and cover that slip up.

“So– the old wizard’s still with you then?” She reaches up and taps his forehead with her fingertips, a habit she’s picked up from Raven as one of the very few forms of friendly physical contact Ruby is still used to. She’s testing the waters in perhaps a dangerous way, asking a question like that, but it was safer than so many other questions she could ask. 

“Yeah, he is, though he’s kinda in timeout right now.” Oscar scratches the back of his neck, glancing away.

She raises an eyebrow. “Timeout?” Even without an explanation, it makes her lips curl upwards at the idea image of some thousand year old being getting sent away like a naughty child. 

“Ha, yep, he doesn’t really come out very often anymore, but he likes to make all sorts of snarky comments that only I can hear. I knew it’d be way too distracting right now, so I sort of put him away for now? He’s usually pretty okay with that, but he’s probably going to be a little annoyed this time,” Oscar sighs, already not looking forward to that mental conversation that’ll happen. 

Ruby snorts, “Good luck with that,” She can’t deny she’s relieved to hear that though, happy even. “I’m sick of standing here, let’s walk again?” She suggests when the awkwardness creeps back up on them.   
Oscar nods and they begin a slow lap around the lake. The dog dashes in front of them, trying to snap up fireflies in his mouth, losing track of them each time their light flickers out. “I missed seeing fireflies, while traveling away from Mistral. They were always around the farm in the warmer months.” 

“I never saw them before I started traveling. There weren’t any, back in Patch, or around Beacon.” Ruby offers, because this is a safe topic, because she only has to recall one small, contained part of her childhood rather than thinking about everything. Still the memories of traveling with Jaune, Ren, and Nora creep up on her. She remembers the fireflies floating around the night she found Jaune listening to that clip of Pyrrah, having his breakdown. 

Oscar seems to pick up on her shift in mood, and doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t further that conversation. They are still carefully dancing around topics. Instead they both just watch the dog’s antics, chuckling at the failed attempts to catch the bugs. 

Their walk together comes to a natural end, in silence just like last time. “I.. well-” Ruby has a false start to what she’s trying to say. “I want to see if you’re any good with that crossbow. Meet me here again in five days? Whoever kills the most Grimm wins.” 

Oscar is clearly biting back a grin, happy that she’s looking for ways to see him again. “Of course. I’ve got to get better at my stealth in getting out here though, Penny doesn’t always power down for the night and she’s really hard to sneak past. I don’t think the same excuse will work again.” It’s a clumsy way to tell her he’s with the group, but interest shines in her expression again.  
“Penny’s with you?” Ruby asks.   
“Yeah, well, the whole group is, mostly, actually, just she’s the one that’s up the latest, so harder to get past,” Oscar shrugs, watching her reaction carefully.

Ruby’s eyes darken very suddenly, her whole expression somber and full of barely restrained anxiety. She grabs his wrist, perhaps a bit too hard. “Don’t tell them about me.” 

“I won’t,” He says, equally as solemn, softly prying her fingers away from his wrist and instead taking that hand in his own, just barely squeezing. “I promise.”   
Because he might not know where she’s been, or what she’s been through, but he knows if he pushes too hard, if she’s made to see them before she’s ready, they will never get her back and she will never forgive him for that.


	10. See You Again

The day when Ruby is meant to meet up with Oscar again, the party goes out.

They finish up before nightfall mostly due to her own precision and haste.  
Raven watches her carefully the whole time, but Ruby pays no mind to that.  
She still manages to get back to Glass Lake in time that night, still smelling of smoke and a little lower on aura levels than she might like, but she makes it.

Oscar is already there this time, waiting for her in the same tree she’d waited for him the previous time. She waves up at him and he hops right down.  
“Ready to show off how well you know how to use that bow of yours?” Ruby asks, and it’s hard, she finds, to muster up a pleasant tone after a day with the party, even if she does like seeing him.  
“Why do I feel like I’m not going to be the one showing off?” Oscar asks in return.

She shrugs, “I don’t know, maybe you only feel like that because you don’t have anything to show off,” It’s fun, to tease, to have someone to have a friendly competition with. She knows there’s no real stakes, and it’s a strange idea for there to be no consequences to losing now. “Okay, only rule is to use just arrows or bullets, nothing other than projectiles. Deal?”

“Deal– hey!” He’s interrupted by her taking off with a boost from her semblance. He just sets off in a similar direction. They both are on the hunt for Grimm now. They both stay close to each other, relatively speaking.

When fighting is such a big part of life, much of relearning who a person is can be through knowing how they fight.  
Ruby has never seen Oscar use any ranged weapon before. He’s good at it. A bow seems to suit him well, he hits his targets and hits them to kill. He’s faster than he used to be, and more readily uses his aura to aid him.  
It’s more difficult for Oscar to put to words how Ruby’s fighting has changed.  
She’s as nimble and captivating as ever, and she’s always looked serene, almost happy, while fighting Grimm. Her movements are more calculated now, but other than that the only way he could describe it was in a feeling, it was if the air around her ran cold while she was in the zone. She looks like a predator that fixed it’s eyes on its prey in the moment before it pounces.  
This whole area was cleared of Grimm by the time they are both breathless and tired.  
They meander back over to the tree by the lake and sit.  
“I didn’t actually count,” Ruby confesses, she’s long ago stopped counting anything, all it does is let the anxiety creep back into her veins, but she doesn’t explain that part.

“I think that means I win by default,” Oscar laughs, still gasping for air.

“Does not!” She actually looks a touch indignant, which is the most openly expressive he’s seen her so far. “How many did you take down, then?”

Oscar opens his mouth, then closes it again, and looks away. “I lost count too,” He admits, which earns him a shove and a huff from Ruby.

“So we both win, or- both lose. Whatever. You’re not half bad with that thing though,” Ruby mumbles, looking away, off into the distance. “It’s good you have a weapon of your own.”  
 _It’s good you’ve kept your soul._  
That part goes unspoken.

“Yeah, I guess I really needed one. The cane- I kept reaching for it, when I was upset or scared, but I realized it wasn’t really me who knew how to use it, I was falling back on his skills and- well I know there’s other lives that have used bows before, but I still got to learn how to use it on my own.” Oscar looks more content talking about this than she’s ever seen him. There was always something strained, some shadow of fear and uncertainty when talking about Oz before, but now he seems comfortable with it. He’s made peace, in a way.

“Plus dust is fun to use, right?” Ruby asks, to keep it light, to keep her own thoughts from drifting too far.

“Really fun to use. Weiss showed me how to combine it for different effects.” Again he was watching her reaction out of the corner of his eye to the mention of a familiar name.

She doesn’t react at all.  
There is not a hint of emotion reflected on her face, no normal spark of recognition at the name. He might have worried she genuinely doesn’t remember her old teammates if it weren’t for her next words.

“Mhm, you can really blow yourself up with that stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard,” His shoulders relax. She remembers, of course she does, it was a silly fear to have at all.

The night is coming to its end once again.  
She doesn’t want to move, and yet she wants to run.  
It’s a strange conflicting feeling that is pulling at something inside of her.  
She longs for numbness, and hates him a little, for the way his presence disallows that.  
She still doesn’t want to move.

“Well… you’re good with a bow, but I can take you down in hand-to-hand no problem now,” She says.  
It’s an invitation,  
A challenge,  
A confused plea,  
 _I want to see you again._

“Oh yeah? I want to see that. Tomorrow then?” It’s the first time he gives the actual invitation, sets the time.

Ruby nods. She can move now. She can pull herself up from where she sat and disappear into the darkness of the night.  
Oscar keeps his eyes fixed forward,  
not watching the direction she goes,  
not trusting himself enough to keep himself from following otherwise.


	11. It Will Come Back

“Ow!” 

It’s been a long time since something’s caught Oscar so off guard he forgets to use his aura to block. “Uh, Ruby?” He asks, sprawled on the moss covered ground. 

It had taken her less than a moment to knock him down.  
It takes her longer than that to remember how to speak again. “Mhm?” 

“Did you just bite me?” The answer to that question was in deep purple teeth marks already forming on his shoulder. It would fade quickly. 

She’s long forgotten that there are people that don’t fight like this.   
She can’t see what’s strange about what she just did, not right now. 

Oscar well outweighs her now, and has muscles to back it up.   
If he could manage to pin her, he might actually win.   
But Ruby is exceedingly difficult to pin.   
She really fights like a wild animal, teeth, claws and all. 

It’s funny in its own way,   
because her dog had followed her again.   
Because before they started sparring, she had to give that dog a very strict command to stay where he sat, explaining to Oscar that he would try and help her with the fight otherwise.

It wasn’t the dog he had to worry about, when it came to something trying to rip out his throat. 

He yields and the bloodlust drains from her eyes, leaving only the reflection of moonlight in its place.   
She blinks and focuses on him again, like she’s just remembered who she’s with. 

He had approached this like their old play-fights.   
She had approached this like any other fight for her life. 

She holds a hand out, offering him help back to his feet. 

Once he has his balance, and his footing, round two starts. 

She eases up just a little, tries to stay grounded and remember the stakes are low. The lives they lead are so different. If she slips up, he won’t go for the kill.  
He treats this less like they are just playing a game this time. 

  
  


He isn’t defeated quite so quickly this time.   
She still gets him on the ground quickly but they tussle there, he manages to keep from being completely pinned at first.   
He still loses, with her knee pressed against his throat, almost cutting off air completely.  
In a last ditch effort he tries one of her tricks, turning his head to the side and biting her.

His teeth sink into her calf, though the material of her thigh-highs cover any mark that might have been left. She sinks slightly, just a bit more pressure on his neck.   
His vision fades quickly, and he goes limp.   
She pulls away quickly, kneeling next to him, watching carefully. 

Consciousness finds him quickly again.   
He’s lightheaded in a way that leaves a vague grin on his face, oddly giddy.   
  


When his eyes find hers, any worry for him Ruby has fades. 

Her shoulders are shaking.   
She is laughing, laughing so hard, without abandon–  
High off the thrill of such an easy fight that leads to no pain–  
Manic in a way she can’t understand–  
She doesn’t want to understand. 

She collapses next to him, giggling, every time she looks at him, laughter bubbles from her again. 

He’s chuckling along, he can’t take his eyes off her. 

She looks so happy– no that’s not quite the right word.   
Some strange mixture of pain and joy, something held back for so long that the walls holding it back are cracking.   
He is seeing the first small cracks forming. It’s captivating.   
It leaves a smile lingering on his face, and a heavy feeling in his stomach.   
A feeling closer to fear, but not quite, another nameless sensation.   
An emotion more akin to muscle memory.  
A memory so ancient that he knows it’s not quite his own. 

  
“You bit me back!” There’s still the lilt of laughter in her voice.   
Her words pull him from his musing all at once. 

“Well- yeah, it’s payback, right?” He has the time to be embarrassed about it now. It’s hard to get those words out without stuttering. “You’ve got to teach me some of that. You weren’t kidding about being able to beat me in hand-to-hand now,” He once again swallows down all the questions he has, it’s not the time, it’s not worth it to ask. 

“I don’t think I’d be a very good teacher. I don’t know how to explain any of it,” Ruby mumbles, because it’s true. There are no words for the lessons her body learned from the pain of training and enmity towards the disgusting monsters in this world. “But, if we spar some more maybe you’ll learn a thing or two,” She adds after a moment.

And so begins a new routine. They meet at this same spot, they spar, they leave before morning. 

All the while, the tribe moves on to different places.   
Ruby joins the group that scouts out new locations.   
That used to be one of her least favorite tasks, just a boring walk with a handful of old tribes members. She leads them to spots that keep the trek to Glass Lake a short one.   
She still helps to select areas that are rich in resources in both the land and dying villages to pick off.   
She doesn’t let them suffer for her own wants. 

She trades her night time monster hunting for night time sparring sessions.   
Word around Mistral is the beast and her hound that hunt in the night has gone dormant.   
Terrible men can rest easy in the dark, if only for now, for how long they don’t know.  
  


Sometimes her nameless dog comes with, sometimes he doesn’t.   
When he does, he’s taken to trotting up to Oscar, rolling over and demanding to be pet.   
  


A new routine begins, but it doesn’t blend into one endless mass of time with no edges or boundaries to each night. In the tribe, time is a meaningless thing.  
Here, Oscar seems to refuse to let routine sink into something easy.   
Instead he marks time in silly arguments. 

Whether it be about the practicality of gravity dust in weapon making. 

_He will be flat on his back with the wind knocked out of him and Ruby rearing to kick him, and he will still find the breath to debate with her.  
_ _“The uses in combat are so limited, it’s better used in engineering.” She would argue back.  
_ _He would grin, then flinch as he took a knee to the stomach. “Have you seen those missile launchers that use gravity dust though?” He would ask when the pain subsided._

Or whether horses were better than ponies. 

_“Most horses are dumber than rocks! They get scared of anything. I knew one that startled when it saw blackberry bushes.” Oscar would say, diving, dodging, no match for her speed._

_“That’s the thing though! Ponies are smart, and they’re clearly planning things. I don’t know how you can look at them and see anything but pure evil.” She had an aversion to ponies since she was bitten by one at the town fair when she was ten. How long had it been since she remembered that?_

They are completely impractical conversations, they distract from the sparring and waste so much time. 

Later he starts to mark time with trinkets. 

First it was a comic book, a new edition of one she used to keep up with continually. She accepts it, tucks it away,   
pretends there isn’t an excited skip in her step,   
pretends she doesn’t cut this sparring session early to go read the book with just the light of a lamp in her tent. 

Next it was chocolate, the sweetened kind, because he remembers somehow that she doesn’t like bitter flavors. 

She has almost forgotten her own gigantic sweet tooth. Rarely does she get sugary things now, occasionally there is honey for tea, or when she’s off scouting with tribes members and they stop in a pub, she can usually convince the bartender to make her something syrupy and easy to drink. 

She doesn’t tuck the chocolate away.  
She breaks off a piece and lets it melt in her mouth. A noise, a whine almost, creeps up her throat and escapes into the world at that flavor.

Oscar is terribly red in the face, and shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, looking anywhere but at her. He is odd during their sparring that night, like he is trying to avoid any impact at all, dodging and keeping a distance.

He brings all sorts of random little things. 

Foreign fruit from the market that is both sweet and spicy.   
A flower that caught his eye on the way over, swirling red and orange into its center.  
A squeaky rubber bone for the dog– Anytime the dog follows along with Ruby now, he always had that hanging out of his mouth, proudly brandishing it. 

He stubbornly makes every meeting memorable.   
Slowly, very slowly, she forgets how much she hates that he prevents her from detaching, that his very presence seems to force her to feel. 

Then one night he is late. 

They never have a set time to meet, but they always seem to show up right around the same time as each other.   
She thinks nothing of it, at first. She walks a lap around the lake.   
Then another.   
And another. 

There’s this buzzing feeling running in her blood that she ignores. Her nails dig into her palms, then scratch at her arms without noticing, leaving pink trails of scratch marks she doesn’t feel. 

Finally he shows up. He doesn’t notice the odd expression on her face, because he has an odd expression of his own, preoccupied and almost pained. He’s pale and there’s a tension around his eyes like he’s battling a migraine. 

“What held you up?” Ruby asks, nonchalant as she can. 

Oscar hesitates, he gazes off to the side as if the answer would be written there. “Oz found out. He- I, well I hadn’t told him, that you were alive, and all of that. I slipped up, he found out, and he’s sort of been throwing a fit in my head ever since? It feels like someone’s kicking the inside of my skull.”

She didn’t actually realize how good Oscar had gotten at keeping things from Oz. She sort of assumed that the old wizard knew she was alive and around, but apparently Oscar was very good at not mentioning things to the roommate inside his own head. 

“Oh,” Was all she could manage to say, barely a reaction at all. 

“Could you- would you mind talking to him? You don’t have to, of course! But he seems to want to talk to you. I’d be right here, I can put him away if I have to.” The last time Oz had forced control was back when they were barely acquainted, with Jinn, with the lamp. They have an understanding now, this is Oscar’s body and Oscar’s life, Oz is allowed only what Oscar chooses to share. 

Ruby shrugs and shoves down any apprehension. “Sure, go for it.” 

“Thanks,” Oscar mumbles, and in a blink it’s no longer him there. She doesn’t have to see how his eyes take on a more golden hue, or how his posture shifts.   
  


She knows it without looking because she feels nothing again. His shift in consciousness matches her own, as Oscar gives over to Oz, whatever bit of humanity Oscar has recultivated in her gives over to the beast people discuss only in hushed whispers. 

“Hello again Miss Rose. It’s good to see you again, alive and...well.” Oz says, distant in his own way, formality is an imperfect shield, he is genuinely happy to know she lives.  
Ruby rolls her eyes. “Hello again, Mister Oz.” She says flatly, punctuated with a mock curtsy. “I think we can drop the formalities, don’t you?”   
A frown twists at his lips, it’s odd how old Oz can make Oscar’s face look. “You have been through so much,” There’s a sad, knowing air in his tone that makes Ruby tense.   
  


He knows. He knows where she has been, and what she has done.   
He knows, but Oscar doesn’t. Her eyes narrow, somewhere between a silent threat and beg. She can’t hurt him without also hurting Oscar, but Oscar can’t know what she’s become.  
He nods, a promise just as silent, and she can breathe then. He won’t tell Oscar. 

“When you’re ready, your friends and family will be waiting for you with open arms.” He says so assuredly. “They miss you dearly. You have an effect on people Miss Ro- Ruby, you are missed.”

There’s a flash of something in his eyes, he has no stakes in this, he can say what he wishes if he can say it before Oscar reclaims control. “You can be taken off the MIA list easily, they will ask no questions, your huntress license will be reinstated.”  
  
“MIA?” She whispers, like all the air has been knocked out of her. 

Oscar is back even more quickly than he left, and he puts a hand on her arm.   
His presence is the best and the worst thing that could happen in this moment.   
With that touch, she can feel again, and gods she doesn’t want to feel right now. 

The MIA list is something she is far too intimately familiar with. It’s code for ‘dead with no body to recover’. Huntsman can only be put on that list two years after their last appearance. 

Her mother disappeared when she was four years old.   
She was only put on the list when Ruby was six years old.   
  


She remembers the day much more vividly than she remembers anything about her mom. That day her dad locked himself in his room for two weeks.  
Uncle Qrow came back from a mission a week and a half in.  
By then they had been surviving off of fruity pebble cereal with no milk, and Ruby who was already small for her age had lost a terrible amount of weight.  
Yang was trying her very best, but she was only a child, they were only children.  
The sight of that brand of cereal would make Ruby nauseous even to this day. 

  
Now she herself was on that list. If someone searched the huntsman database for the name Rose, they would two names in red, crossed out. 

~~  
Summer Rose~~ MIA

 ~~Ruby Rose~~ MIA

Oscar was right in front of her, hands on her shoulders, waiting for her to come back to herself enough to talk. “I’m so sorry Ruby, I shouldn’t have let-” 

  
“How long?” She whispers, interrupting him. 

“What do you mean?”

“How long since… how long have I been gone?” Over two years, she knows that much now. 

“Three- uh almost four years,” He answers in disbelief, she really has no idea how long it’s been, how old she is, when the last time she saw anyone was. 

“Okay,” She mumbled, like that new information just bounced right off her. “Okay.” She repeats, looking up at him, into his eyes. 

She sighs.   
On the surface she looks dulled, distant, devoid of feeling.   
But no, feeling nothing is a pleasure she isn’t allowed around him.   
There’s that terrible raging storm bubbling up under her skin again, the one she thought the life she leads now had qualmed.  
There are those vines of- of something threatening to constrict around her throat again. 

“Come on, let’s fight,” She takes off towards the clearing, waiting for him to follow.

One breath in, and she can feel herself choking.

She barely waits for him to take stance before bounding at him. It’s desperate and vicious, what she’s taking out on him now. He is doing whatever he can to keep up with her, but she gets him on the ground.

She’s all teeth and claws again, he has bloody scratches littering his body, and a couple of splotchy bite marks to match. 

Her eyes catch his, and he can swear there’s a glow in the silver reflection he sees. 

She wants to scream.   
She wants to breathe. 

Instead her lips press to his. He freezes, eyes wide, and then he just relaxes. 

It’s not gentle,  
it’s not sweet,  
it’s forceful and as hasty as all other moves she’s made,  
it’s as much a part of their sparring match as any of this, he realizes.

When he doesn’t pull away, she bites his lip, presses closer, asking him to play along. And he does. Not quite as vehement in his response as she is, not at first. 

She is trying to make him understand how much she hates that she can’t escape these feelings around him.   
She is trying to throw away every last shred of that romantic idea that a happily ever after ends with something sweet and beautiful. Maybe it does, but she doesn’t deserve that.   
She is trying to lose herself again in a new and different way.   
She is weak and vulnerable right now. He could kill her right now, so easily, and everything the tribe has taught her has told her that’s exactly what he should do.   
  


She shifts her weight, rolls them over so his weight is above her. So maybe he can understand he has the upperhand now, this is afterall, still a fight, she instigated like an actual fight rather than a spar. He can, and should, be going for a kill, something in her mind tells her.   
  


When he doesn’t catch on, when his lips on hers only match what she gives and his hands stay hesitantly on her waist, she groans in frustration.

She pulls away enough to grab his hands and actively put them around her wrists, showing him how to pin her very much the same way she’s pinned him numerous times during their sparring practice. He gives her a half questioning look, dazed but hesitant. He is met only with a glare and another kiss. 

He won’t kill her, of course he won’t, he never would. Her logic is entirely incompatible with his there. 

But if she wants to fight, and wants him to bite back, and hold her wrists down until they would bruise without her aura up, if pain is the sensation she needs to give and get right now to come down from this, he can do that. He can do that only because that’s what they’ve been doing all along, he knows her strength, and trusts her implicitly to know when this should end. 

They both can taste blood. 

They are left with short gasping breaths, so similar and so different to any other sparring match. This time it’s Oscar who offers Ruby a hand to help stand up. She is grounded again, that terrible rage inside her is sated, for now, or at least is brought back to a low simmer, and masked by the after effects of adrenaline. 

They are both a complete mess, but they have the touch of shy smiles. 

Ruby takes a step to leave, like usual, but hesitates. 

She turns on her heels back to him, realizing she’s forgotten something. She nearly stumbles before striding forward until she is right in front of him. “See you in three days,” She punctuates that with the quickest kiss on the cheek, standing on her tiptoes. 

“Thank you,” She whispers, and she is off again.


	12. Talk with Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here be the Spotify playlist of songs I listen to while writing this, if anyone's interested.  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6GBrAPxZdual2ZvASGtJov

Their next meeting is no different than the previous ones. It isn’t awkward, or stilted, they don’t talk about it. They spar, and they argue about pizza toppings, the topic of the day. It was as if nothing at all had happened.  
Except that wasn’t the case either.  
The meeting after that, no topic of conversation can hold her focus, she is distracted and vicious.

It’s not unheard of, that there were nights where the talking tapered off into silent fighting.  
She stares at him like she’s sizing him up, like she’s trying to make a decision.  
All at once that decision is made, and proves that attack of a kiss from before to be anything but a fluke.  
It melds easily into this more intense struggle of a spar.  
It’s a touch less rabidly initiated than the last time, and Oscar knows from the beginning this time that she wants him to fight with her.  
It’s all a part of the fight, it becomes a part of the routine in it’s own way.

  
It always leaves Oscar dizzy, and Ruby much calmer.

It doesn’t happen every time they meet, not at all.  
When it does, usually there’s a reason behind it, a grief Ruby doesn’t want to think about in words, or in feelings, but rather in actions.  
There are times when Oscar wants to ask what happened, what’s wrong.  
Those are the times when she attacks before even greeting him, when things drag on, when she doesn’t keep her aura up just so she can feel pain more clearly.

He might not ask her that, but strangely, out of this comes more questions actually asked. It’s Ruby that asks them first, these cautious little questions in quieter moments.  
  
She’s toeing a line in her own mind, eking out tiny bits of information about what’s happened in the time she’s been gone, who he travels with now, if the world was still about to end.  
Oscar realizes why she’s asking now only after the first time she steps over the line in her question, or rather he stepped over the line in his answer.  
He mentions offhandedly how the group had stopped in Patch, he had left it as a brief statement even though there was much more to be said about it.  
He knows she doesn’t want to hear that much about it. Apparently she didn’t want to hear about it at all, because she shuts him up with her lips on his again.  
It’s a muted furiosity this time, a slower build, begging him to be quiet and distract her from whatever emotions were overwhelming her.  
  
He understands then, her new verbalized curiosities.  
  
Before, the consequences of overstepping were that she would run.  
If she ran, there was no promise they would ever meet again.  
That fear is what kept Oscar so careful in his word choice, so quick to bite his tongue when questions came to him.  
  
Apparently Ruby shared that fear, because things change now they are playing a game with different stakes.  
  
If something is too much, the consequence is painful and overwhelming in it’s own way, but familiar and much more welcome to both of them than the idea of absence.  
It gives Oscar the freedom to ask questions too, much more vague and mundane ones that almost always leads to her swiftly silencing him. Still, now he can try.

That newfound bit of boldness Oscar has bleeds into their fights.  
Sometimes, as her nails dig into his shoulders and her mouth is on him like she’s trying to both drown him and consume him at once, he eases back slowly. So slowly that she doesn’t notice what he’s doing until the grounding intensity and pain gives way to a more flighty pleasure.  
It’s a feeling she can only stomach for brief moments at a time.  
  
Gentle is a terrifying concept to her.  
Pleasure is not something she wants,  
_Not something she deserves_ , a small voice in the back of her mind tells her.

Occasionally, she gives him that. Not always when he’s asking, but instead in a quick kiss goodbye, or a softer touch.  
Because she’s not ignorant to the fact that he’s not killed off his own romantic ideals the way she has.  
Because she’s being cruelly generous in the most selfish way she can.  
It’s his own fault, she tells herself, if he’s fooling himself about this all. Maybe it’s her fault, a little bit, for feeding that delusion.

There are times where he doesn’t ease up, but rather stops them all together. It’s happened a couple of times now, when she’s too lost in fervor that he’s afraid she won’t come back, or when he gets lost in it too– there are boundaries that he won’t cross, things he refuses to contextualize into a fight or make into some way subdue her. If they stray too close to those boundaries, he stops them, because he’s not as confident she would now.

  
She always stops as soon as she realizes that’s what she’s being asked to do.  
She never puts distance between them unless asked though, even then.  
Instead she goes from straddling him, pinning him down, to collapsed on top of him, still tense and breathing shallowly; her fingers still entwined with his with her nails still digging into the backs of his hands. He lays very still and breathes deeply, distracting himself as she very slowly comes back into focus.  
When her fingers relax their grip, he frees one hand and rests it on her back, idly tracing the lines of her shoulder blades and spine.  
She hums, closing her eyes in one of the incredibly rare moments she isn’t fully on the defensive.  
On those nights they part ways closer to dawning morning than midnight.

Back in the confines of the tribe, she is being watched more carefully and with more scrutiny than she has been since she first arrived.  
It is after one of those times where she comes back just before daylight, that she is woken by Raven not long after.  
  
Training was a thing of the past, or so Ruby had thought.  
  
She has proven herself as part of the group, and a better fighter than all but Raven herself.  
But this morning, with a silent demand, she is brought out for training and not allowed her weapon. It has been a long time, she realizes, since she’s practiced with anyone who poses a real threat to her. She is exhausted, from a day full of tasks previous, and a night that stretched on to give her no real time to rest.  
More than that, she has no emotion to fuel this fight, here she is calm, here she can barely remember she exists.  
  
She would forget she had a body if it weren’t for the fact she intentionally didn’t let her heal a couple of the bite marks Oscar had left on her.  
  
Strangely that tiny bit of pain and physical evidence reminds her she is no ghost.  
  
Her calmness and exhaustion is very much her downfall and if pain was really all she needed to feel real then getting kicked to the ground and beaten so swiftly right now would have the same effect.  
It doesn’t.

“You’ve gotten sloppy,” Raven says, kicking Ruby down once more before she can actually stand.

She can’t argue with that, because Raven is right, she has. She expects this lesson and reminder to be the same as any other that Raven has taught her. So then, it surprises her when she isn’t kicked down a third time. Instead there is that hint of concern in Raven’s expression that always unsettles Ruby, but also in bigger quantities, amusement.

“You are an adult,” Raven continues. “And what you do with that is your own concern, but don’t let it make you weaker, you know what a weak link does to everyone else.”  
Ruby nods, yes, that lesson is an old one, with an added meaning now that she doesn’t pick up on at first. Raven’s eyes narrow, just slightly.

“You are an adult,” She repeats. “And what you seek is as normal as what any animal seeks, in the spring time,” A rephrase, roundabout still but enough for Ruby to understand the implication. Her eyes widen, and somehow this is ten times more mortifying than the even more vague talk her dad tried to give her, or the far too blunt and not quite age appropriate talks both Yang and uncle Qrow tried.  
  
“I’m not doing th-” An immediate denial cut short by the fact that any explanation she could give is a dangerous one.  
Raven rolls her eyes, reaching forward and tapping a spot on Ruby’s collarbone, right next to a very obvious bite mark she had forgotten to cover or let heal.

Ruby’s face burns, embarrassment was apparently still an emotion she knows how to feel, unfortunately.

“As I said, what you do is of your own concern. But make sure you know what you’re doing. Remember to keep yourself first, and keep in mind there are very few things more vulnerable than a young child, it is a guaranteed way to slow you down.” And Raven actually laughs at the way that contorts the embarrassment in Ruby’s expression further.

“That is not going to happen,” Ruby spits out quickly.  
“Good,” She nods. “Now you’ll show up here every morning and fight until you can give a less pathetic performance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just fyi this isn't going to be an explicit fic at all. With what's discussed in this chapter I could see people thinking that but nope, gonna stay right at the level you've seen so far.


	13. Reprieve

There isn’t a moment of rest, during the day now. She is training from before sunup, and any spare moment is filled with some other task. She isn’t allowed to be part of the scouting crew now, so the next move brings them a farther distance from her and Oscar’s normal meetup spot. It’s either a long walk, or waste aura to use her semblance.  
She’s tired by the time she gets there no matter what.  
It rarely shows on the surface, but it’s clear when they fight.  
She’s not quite as fast, doesn’t hit quite as hard.  


It’s so deeply frustrating. 

For the first time ever Oscar has the high ground without her handing it to him. He’s managed to actually get her in a bind well enough to remember not to give her room to kick free either, he’s made that mistake before. He seems as shocked by it as she does. There was no way he would have won if she wasn’t already so exhausted, but he did just win and that’s what matters. He’s got this proud grin on his face as she struggles just once more to try and escape before giving in and giving him a daring glare. He laughs quietly before leaning in and stealing a gentle kiss, pulling away before she can make anything else of it.  
There’s a playful glean in his eyes as she growls in annoyance.  
He eases away from her just enough for her to move him, and just as he was expecting she takes all control into her hands the instant he gave even a little.  
He doesn’t fight back, maybe just to annoy her a little more.

Their next meeting is marked by rain coming down in heavy sheets and lightning crackling in the distance. It wasn’t the first time the weather was rough on a night they planned for. Normally they would both just ignore the rain, but tonight Ruby is already swaying on her feet by the time she gets there, and somehow fighting in this downpour sounds completely unappealing.  
“Wanna go somewhere else?” She asks, raising her voice to speak over the sound of the downpour that already had them both drenched.  
Oscar nods, letting her lead the way, not questioning where they were going. She could tell him she was leading him to his death, and he might take a step to follow. 

The ground is spongy, and difficult to navigate in areas as they weave between trees and through marshland. Even with their pace slowed, they arrive only an hour or so later.  
There are lights in the distance, the glow of lamps from inside houses, a small village. Small, but strong because of its proximity to the larger city, and its safe trade routes, Ruby happens to know. She pauses to slip her mask on. She hasn’t worn it around him since that first night.  
The streets are quiet, no one is out in weather like this.  
Yet there is a small hum of soundless anxiety that hangs in the air.  
People were glancing out their windows from behind curtains, waiting, watching. 

The beast who prowls in the night is a blessing alone,  
and a curse with her pack,  
but what is she when she brings only one other with her? 

She hardly notices them, anymore, in their staring, in their praying.  
Oscar notices, but can’t understand. 

They veer off to a building finally, and if the sign wasn’t there then the distinct smell of old pipe smoke and ale was good enough indication this was a pub. It’s no different than in many other small trade villages, a homey bar on the ground level and an Inn upstairs.  
She likes this place because no one in town asks questions, and the owner is both kind and willing to make very sweet drinks without some tinge of judgement on his face.  
It’s near empty inside, a few men sat at the bar, laughing with the owner who was bartending.  
Laughter lowers to hushed whispers that quickly turn to silence as all the men other than the owner excuse themselves, avoiding looking directly at Ruby in particular. 

When all of them have left, she slips the mask off once more and the old man, giant and greying as he is, smiles in greeting.  
“Moon child! Long time no see, and ya brought yourself a friend too,” He’s less cautious around her than the others, by far. 

She waves in the man’s direction with a disinterested greeting, picking out a spot in the corner, near enough the hearth with a fire burnt down to orange embers that they both might have a chance to warm up. 

Oscar slides in next to her, quiet too, taking in this odd change of pace in all it’s details. 

The man comes by with a couple of towels, old and nearly stiff, but still useful to dry their dripping hair. 

“Jus’ your usual for ya?” He asks Ruby. Her eyes flick over to Oscar briefly before nodding. “An’ for your friend?” She glares at the odd way he says the word ‘friend’.  
“He’ll have the same,” She answers before Oscar can even think to. 

Her eyes follow the man until he is acceptably far away again, before turning her attention back to Oscar. “Have you drank before?”  
He’d be of age to anywhere in Mistral now, not that any of these small towns cared to check anyways. 

“I- yeah I have. Never play a drinking game with Nora if you want to survive. Actually no, never let her play a drinking game in general, if you want to survive.” And neither can pinpoint when they reached this point, but she doesn’t freeze at the mention of her old friends. She even laughs a little, imagining it. 

“You drink then?” He asks in return, the answer was obvious but also still somehow surprising to him. The very first time he had met her, it was in getting her very drunk uncle back home safe. Somehow that, plus her hatred of bitter flavors, and her constant vigilance now didn’t lend to the idea that she would want to drink. “Mm, sometimes, occasionally.” She nods. It’s never truly safe to be that unguarded, she only really drinks when the other tribe members pester her about it, or when she can’t find it in herself to care enough. 

With their clothes drying enough to stop clinging, and the warmth of this place leeching the chill from her body, her exhaustion is creeping back up on her quickly. She is nearly startled then, when two glasses are set on the table, she hadn’t noticed anyone approach.

Oscar picks up one glass with a certain amount of suspicion, sniffing it before trying it.  
It’s almost painfully sweet, some sort of strawberry and cherry blended thing. He might not even guess the sheer amount of alcohol packed into it, if it didn’t leave a burning sensation crawling down the back of his throat.

Ruby snorts at his cautious approach. He raises an eyebrow at her, to which she takes her own glass, and while maintaining eye contact the entire time, drinks half of it. It’s an intimidation tactic of sorts, or a challenge, a thing she’s picked up from the tribe. His eyes widen, less out of intimidation and more out of this odd mixture of concern and interest that makes it impossible to look away.  
He sighs then, drinking more of his own. It’s not bad really, but even a quarter of that glass and it’s making him feel a little bit fuzzy headed quickly. 

On some level, in some vague way he understands this as a show of trust on her part, that she is willing to lower her defenses this much.  
Ruby hasn’t even thought that far, all she knows is being tired only seems to make being around him a more sharp, in focus experience that she would literally kill to make stop.  
Alcohol seems a better alternative, at the moment.  
She finishes off the second half of her glass as quickly as the first half.  
Which is probably– most definitely a mistake. It softens everything though, and that was all she was asking for. She’s resting against him slightly, and doesn't even realize it at first, just as she doesn’t realize she’s started fidgeting with the sleeve of Oscar’s jacket.  
“Hey, are you...okay?” And oh what a well of a question that really was, if only he knew.  
“Mhm, just, tired, mostly.” She mumbles, more of an admission than he was expecting. 

She lays her head against his shoulder, sighing, aware enough to know she’s feeding into whatever sweet notion he’s got in his head, yet again. 

The buzzing warmth in her stomach wards off any twinge of remorse that might normally find its way in.  
Where she would normally shy from more pleasant things, she leans in, for now, for one bizarre and surreal moment in time she refuses to care, she’s too tired to care. 

Oscar has no clue what to do with any of this.  
The rituals he’s come to expect are absent,  
and he misses the direction that her usual demands gave him,  
and he misses the pain and thoughtlessness of it all,  
and maybe any hope of bringing her back had always been a hopeless one,  
and maybe he’s known that, and doesn’t care,  
and maybe he’s become too comfortable knowing he’s fallen for a wild thing. 

Ruby finally lifts her head, stretching and sitting up straight, trying to keep herself awake. “So,” She yawns. “Whatcha going to do, when you’re done with the whole saving the world business?”  
It takes Oscar a bit to sort out the fact that Ruby just asked that, and a bit longer to try to answer. It strays so far beyond any line into personal business they avoid talking about. 

He shrugs. “I... don’t know actually,” Careful with his words, even if she wasn’t being careful with the questions she’s asking. She looks at him, for once waiting for him to elaborate. “I don’t think about it much? There’s not really a point, thinking about it, yet.”  
Even a little hazy at the moment, Ruby catches something familiar in his tone that makes her frown. She reaches up and flicks him on the nose.  
He winces, “Ow- hey what was that for?”  
“Cause you’re being stupid,” She says simply. “You are your own person, so pick your own way you want this to end,”

As if that were an easy thing to do, as if his life wasn’t intrinsically tangled in something bigger than himself that he has no choice in.  
He can’t run away from the end of the world because it will follow him into death, it will consume him in death.  
He might be able to live as his own person, but he doesn’t have the freedom to die his own person.  
He hasn’t made peace with that, quite yet. 

She makes a realization then, small and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. If he has no plans then he has no expectations here, with her.  
Maybe she’s not been feeding a delusion of romance for him, but rather she’s been letting him run, if only in small moments, from the future. 

“Nobody gets to pick their own ending, completely though, right? Can’t force people to stay that don’t want to, for instance,” He asks, watching her carefully.  
Ruby frowns again. “Y...Right.” 

“What about you, what’s your future look like?” It’s a risk, it’s always a risk asking her questions, but tonight is strange. 

“I- huh, guess I don’t think about it much, either,” She mumbles, because it sounds hypocritical to get on his case about it when she gives it no thought personally.  
It isn’t though, she could argue, because Oscar deserves a future, a happy ending to this all, and she doesn’t. 

“At all?” He’s pushing his luck, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it with the way she’s resting her head against his shoulder yet again. 

“Mm, nope, not at all.” She’s thought so little of the future for so long that she doesn’t bother keeping track of time in any meaningful way. There were stories she loved as a child, but she rarely loved how they ended even back then. Happily ever after is so vague, and the domestic endings of so many romance novels seems hellish to her now.  
“You haven’t thought about it at all either?” If he is going to push, she’ll push back again too. 

“Not- not really. I thought for a while that maybe if this all ends well, maybe I’d go back and live on the farm again for a little bit. But I stopped by last year, I hadn’t really told my aunt that I was leaving to begin with you know? Guess I was too late, it was all gone when I got there.” 

She tilts her head on his shoulder enough to look up at him. “Gone?”

“Abandoned, I guess is a better word for it, the farm was at least. The nearest town though was completely burnt.”

She had thought the alcohol had softened the edges of all feelings.  
Apparently not.  
An icy blade of realization runs the length of her spine.  
She tenses and it doesn’t go unnoticed. “Where- where’s the town, does it have a name?” 

It confuses Oscar, he hadn’t expected her to show that much concern about it. “It doesn’t have a name, no. It is- was a very small town, west of Mistral City, and pretty far from it too.” 

Ruby bites her tongue, trying to filter through a blur of memories to see what towns fit that description, so many do. They are all so very similar, and all the same in their destruction. “Your aunt, you don’t know what happened to her?”

“No,” He shakes his head.  
There are, for once, so many words Ruby wants to say, questions she wants to ask.  
Without knowing it, he has handed her the most perfect and terrible way to destroy this all.  
It has to end eventually, whatever this is, and it won’t end well no matter what they do.  
If she’s going to destroy something, might as well do it in the most thorough, quick, and painful way possible, that sickening rage in her says.  
It whispers that to her, because he has been more than she ever deserves already.  
She can’t, not yet, not now.  
In one small rejection of that terrible loathing, she forces herself to relax, and to tuck herself closer to him and nuzzle against the crook of his neck. For once, she will let herself enjoy something. Maybe she only lets herself do that because she knows it will only make inevitable more painful when it comes. 

It was Oscar’s turn to be tense, because he’s completely unaccustomed to having Ruby this close to him without a whole lot of bruising and biting. Feeling her breath against his neck is exceedingly distracting in a way he normally has no time to pay attention to. Slowly, hesitantly, he winds an arm around her waist. She doesn’t pull away in the way he’s expecting either. 

“Uh, Ruby?” He finally speaks, quiet and not wanting to completely ruin this moment. 

“Wha?” She doesn’t lift her head to speak, she sounds a little irritated at having to speak at all. 

“Are you falling asleep on me?” 

“Maybe, why not?” She curls closer still, as if to make a point of it. 

“Because, this isn’t exactly a place to sleep?” He’s smiling, glad she can’t see it. 

“Sure is, upstairs ‘s. They don’t care what I do around here.” An odd way to explain it, but it’s true, drinks and a place to stay is something they ask no money from her for here.

“Well, we aren’t exactly upstairs.” Oscar points out, earning a grumble from Ruby as she pulls away. 

“You are being so annoying.”

“And you’re not stopping me.” A flash of a more familiar gaze of a predator out for blood shines in her eyes for just a moment after he says that. 

“I will, tomorrow. But tonight? Quit being annoying, be nice,” That threat, or promise, and the near whine in her tone by the end makes his face burn. 

He ducks his head to hide that as they stand, but she’s already off to grab a key from the man at the bar anyways.  
Upstairs she takes off her cloak, and weapon, and all other sharp things. Oscar does the same with his jacket, and weapons, but where Ruby is content to crawl under the covers quickly, he hesitates. 

Whatever he is thinking is quickly interrupted by a hand around his wrist and a quick tug that trips him into falling sideways onto the bed. It leaves him awkwardly half crushing Ruby, with his elbow jabbing into her stomach. When he looks at her she doesn’t look like she regrets it, not even a little bit. “You’re overthinking, lay down,” She says. It’s not as if she doesn’t understand why he’s hesitating, or the implications associated. She very nearly wants to remind him of what they frequently do when they meet, and that her intentions here are much more innocent, but that would be admitting that she sees what they do as anything more than a fight. 

He gives in then and pulls back the covers. It takes all of two seconds after he’s settled in for her to lay on him despite there being plenty of room on the bed. For as adverse as she normally is to touch that isn’t in context of a fight, sleep is one exception. She’s used to having a dog or five piled up with her anyways, having something warm and alive near her seems to allow her some amount of peace in dreams she can’t control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For everyone saying that Ruby needs hugs, enjoy your fluff, it's all you're getting before things pop off in a major way~


	14. If It'll Make You Happier

Oscar wakes first the next morning to dim grey light shining through the window, the sky still overcast but no longer dumping rain. Ruby was still laying on him, using his stomach as a pillow with the rest of her draped over his legs. She looks peaceful, an expression he hasn’t seen from her in so long. He isn’t sure he’s ever actually seen her look completely at ease, actually. 

He brushes her hair out of her face, it’s longer than she used to wear it, he notes, with choppy wild ends that look as if she just uses a blade to cut it. 

She’s not a heavy sleeper anymore, and that small touch is enough to rouse her even if she doesn’t open her eyes quite yet. The slight tension her body took, the way she always held herself, tells him she’s awake. 

“Ruby,” He whispers. She ignores him completely. With his fingers still touching the ends of her hair, he tugs on it lightly. “Ruby,” He repeats, biting back a grin at the grousing and grumbling that earned him. 

She turned her head to hide her face against his stomach.

“Go ‘way.” She mutters, this is the best sleep she’s gotten in weeks, she doesn’t want it to end. 

“I can’t do that, you’re kind of on me. Also I can’t feel my legs.” He can’t hold back a laugh then, which only makes her grumble more because of the movement of it. 

She shifts, and scoots up a little further so she’s laying on his chest instead, legs completely tangled in the sheets. “There, better? When I’m actually awake, I’m gonna make you stop being annoying ‘cause you’re still doing it.” 

“Looking forward to it,” Oscar sighs, pins and needles running through his legs now that she wasn’t laying on them. 

Ruby dozes, trying to ignore all the concerns that flooded her every time she’s conscious enough to actually think. 

She’s missing training, she hadn’t told anyone she was going out and Raven will be angry. 

Then there’s Oscar, she doesn’t know what she’s doing with him here. Moreover, what he told her about his aunt and the farm haunted her. Somewhere in the time spent between awake and asleep she decided she would have to figure it out somehow, she needed to know for sure whether she or the tribe was responsible for that. The guilt that was held back by alcohol last night no longer has such a barrier. 

Eventually those anxieties bleed in and consume any ability to stay still or try to sleep. She kicks away the sheets and pulls herself out of bed. Oscar had stayed away the whole time, and sits up once Ruby’s off of him. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Ruby says, already gathering her stuff because moving around distracts her just the tiniest bit from all that’s running through her head. Between the time they head out and the time the town is out of sight again, there must have been fifty different times where she almost asks him, almost demands he take her to his old home so she can see for herself, so she can know if this dread in her stomach is warranted. 

She doesn’t, because every time it almost slips out of her mouth something in her steals away her voice, or makes her jaw clench. 

She doesn’t want to think about it, she wants this feeling to go away, a burning and sickening feeling altogether so similar and so different than the normal terrible feeling that she can never get to go away completely. Normally, there is no target, it’s a resentment of the world and every wrong in it. Now it’s wholly directed at herself. 

She does what she always does when she wants to not think about it, she seeks out Oscar. He isn’t expecting it even though he should by now. As they walk through the wilds, she finds the perfect moment and attacks. She gets him with his back against a tree, but standing she has to drag him down enough to meet his lips. He is far too cooperative in that pursuit, yet uses the distraction of the kiss to free himself and dodge away. With a little bit of speed and effort, he gets his arms around her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She barely even tries to kick him, so he knows the game hasn’t fully begun yet. 

“Thought you said you’d make me stop being annoying,” He teases, ducking his head to press a kiss to her neck, knowing it’d bother her that he was being gentle. That was enough to properly bring the fight out in her as she hooked one foot behind his ankle and tripped him. 

This is all muscle memory now, a routine that never ceased to be both confusing and fun. He’s kept count of the number of times he’s ended up laying with his back on the ground and her on top of him. He adds today to that count as she pushes up his shirt and bites exposed skin. He hisses but doesn’t remember to try to fight in that moment, she doesn’t seem to mind. 

There are a handful of moments, in Ruby’s life, where she has felt the world shift under her, changes all so terrible. She has no control over any of those moments. 

She has no control over the portal that rips its way into thin air, or that Raven appears through it, just a few feet away from them. She lifts her head and silver eyes meet red ones, terrifyingly cold, calm, and observant. 

Ruby scrambles away from Oscar, like a child caught doing something they shouldn’t. 

Oscar only vaguely recognizes Raven at first, it takes him a moment to realize who this person is. 

Raven recognizes Oscar in an instant, and suddenly her eyes are not nearly as cold or calm, in fact there is quite literally the glow of fire in them. 

She looks back to Ruby with an expression that demands explanation.    
  
“I- I.. I can-” Ruby can’t find words, the whiplash of this all, the adrenaline that’s making her heart race in eight different ways steals words from her. She pulls herself to her feet, shrinking in on herself. 

Oscar stands as well, watching, worried. 

“I told you that what you do is your business, but this?” Raven gestures to both of them. “What are you thinking?” 

“I don’t know,” And it’s the truth, in many ways, there aren’t enough words in existence or time in a life to explain the things she’s thought that brought her to this point. 

“Of all things you could be doing, you’re screwing around with Ozpin?”

In an instant there’s a much more familiar furious look in Ruby’s eyes, she’s poised for a fight, this is a standoff. “That’s not his name,” 

Oscar is so used to it, that it hardly fazed him. People who knew what Oz is, and knew about him, would only ever see him as a vessel for Oz and see his actions as those of Oz no matter what he did. He could be his own person, even if others refused to see him as such. 

“What?” Raven asks, stance matching Ruby’s then. 

“That’s not his name, that’s not who he is,” And the fire in Raven’s eyes seems to flare at Ruby’s words. 

Raven laughs with no humor in it. “You’re really that delusional huh? That’s okay, he’s good at fooling people, making them do what he wants.” 

“I’m not delusional!” Ruby growls.

“Like I said, it’s okay, child,” Raven has an almost soothing tone, standing ready for a fight but also like she’s talking Ruby down. “We’ve all been tricked by him before, haven’t we? Of course he wants to keep you close, he thinks those eyes of yours are the answer.” 

“I- what?” She’s a touch less furious, and a little more curious. 

“Isn’t it obvious? People don’t normally get into Beacon two years early, you know. It’s to keep your power close, it always is, to build you up young with these stupid- this sick hero complex, make you think you can save the world then send you to your death. Rinse and repeat. Happened to Summer, and you’re letting it happen to you.” Raven’s voice curls strangely around the name, like it’s painful for her to say. Ruby freezes at her mother’s being mentioned like that. 

She knows Raven is wrong, somewhat, at least. She knows that no one knows what happened to her mother, not entirely. She thinks. It’s what she’s been told. She blinks, staring not at Raven, but past her. There’s no rebuttal she can make. 

The tension in the air snaps. Raven has been standing ready to attack, but her target isn’t Ruby. Oscar isn’t ready, isn’t prepared to have a sword swung at him with every intention to kill. 

Ruby doesn’t think, she acts. She’s between Oscar and Raven before the hit can connect, blocking it with her scythe, protecting him. 

“I don’t care!” She shouts, arm straining against the blow. “He’s not Ozpin, he’s not using me. He’s not the one that hurt you.” 

_ ‘I’m using him.’  _ Ruby wants to say. She wants to tell Raven that she’s got it all backwards, but she doesn’t. 

A flash of rage, then something else, then something nearing sadness crosses Raven’s face as she stares at Ruby. She lowers her sword, and takes a step back. 

She doesn’t blink, she demands that eye contact. “Make up your mind then, and don’t come back until you do,” Raven turns, her back to both of them, unconcerned with any potential attack. Then she is a bird, and then she is off.

They are left with nothing but silence and each other. 

Oscar breaks the silence first, reaching out to her. “Ruby…” 

That’s all it takes to snap Ruby out of the trance she was in, and into some awful panic. She startles when he touches her shoulder, jumping away. 

“I can’t- I’m sorry, I just, can’t.” She doesn’t explain, she doesn’t even really know what she’s saying. 

She’s running again. Full circle it seems, as she runs and runs well past when her lungs burn, until her body forces her to stop, dry heaving, coughing. 

She’s so familiar with these lands now, it’s impossible to get lost even when she wants to. 

She doesn’t stop moving, but she changes course and changes pace. 

She’s back at Glass Lake, a place that now holds so many memories. 

She stays there for two days, she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t seek shelter when it rains. 

She just stays there. 

She doesn’t know why. 

That’s a lie. 

She does know why. 

Because she knows how stories are supposed to go. 

Because she’s strangled her romantic side but it’s a stubborn thing that refuses to die. 

It’s a lost cause, and a frivolous hope, but she hopes still that he might find her here. 

He never shows up. 

Cold, wet, and shaking, she seeks the tribe again. 

She passes everyone, ignores them all, finds Raven who is thankfully alone.

Raven watches her approach, expression stoic. “So you’ve returned.” 

Ruby sinks to her knees, in part because the world feels like it’s tilting, and in part a gesture to ask forgiveness. 

“I have- or I will. I have one last thing, to make peace with before I can return. Can I?” 

Raven considers the request before nodding. “Stand up, you look ridiculous like that.” 

Ruby pulls herself up, more able to now that she knows she has somewhere to return to, she hasn’t ruined everything yet. 

A thought creeps into her mind, a question, one that’s passed her by before when she was less brave or less broken, unable to as. 

“Can I ask you another question?” 

“I’m listening,” Raven waits, watching Ruby try and form the words. 

“Why did you leave?” Again such a vague question, but one she understands. It’s a question that’s been posed to her before, by her daughter, by her husband, by her brother. There isn’t an answer she could give that any of them would understand. 

This time an answer is something she can give, because the girl standing before her is so very painfully much like Summer, yet at the same time is everything she wasn’t. 

“Because there’s darkness, in every corner of Remnant . Getting rid of one evil doesn’t get rid of them all.” They had such a similar rage inside of themselves, at how unfair it all is. “They wanted to fight off every bad thing, and throw away their lives away for a cause that will fix nothing.” She sounds so angry for a moment, then looks away. 

Then a crack, just the tiniest one in Raven’s facade, the smallest hint of weakness and the biggest secret uttered all at once. 

“I wasn’t good enough for them, no matter how much they wanted to believe I could be. I couldn’t be what they thought they could make me. I couldn’t be happy.” 


	15. Tear it Apart and Start Again

Ruby stays only the night in the tribe’s camp.

When she sets off the next morning, the dog– her nameless dog, keeps following her no matter how many times she tells him to stay. 

She doesn’t know how long she will be gone, or where this journey might lead her, it would be better if he just stays put. 

He’s stubborn, he follows. She sighs.

Then they are heading first to Kuchinashi.

She has no idea where to go once she gets there, but she knows that Oscar and the rest of them have been staying somewhere in the city. 

She wanders aimlessly, keeping a sharp eye on everything.

She feels wrong, too exposed, not having her mask on while she walks around such a populated area. 

She can’t wear it though, it will attract too much attention. 

She’s become something more recognizable with the mask than without it. 

Still she’s cautious, the people she’s on the lookout for are perhaps the only ones who would recognize her but she doesn’t want to be seen by them. 

She is trying to find Oscar. She's not ready for everyone else to know she’s still alive and might never be truly ready for it. 

They can’t know about her right now, she’ll let them know once she’s back with the tribe. Maybe. Or, well, Oscar might just tell them for her at that point. 

Hours are spent, weaving through the outer edges with all it’s street vendors and bustling foot traffic. 

As she gets farther into the city, she notices someone following her, staying in the shadows almost more effectively than she is. 

A grimy little kid, a pickpocket who’s eyeing her up as a target. 

If they picked anyone else, they would be doing an excellent job and probably would have succeeded by now. 

She doesn’t carry much money on her, rarely ever needs it. 

She can practically hear Raven’s scolding in her mind as she digs through her bag for a few lien, telling her not to take pity or give this child an easy time. She ignores those lessons, for just this once, and holds the money out to the kid, who looks both shocked at being noticed, and suspicious of her generosity. 

A hand darts out and grabs what she offers, and the child is nowhere in sight soon after. Children in the city have a much better chance of survival than the ones outside. She’s seen too many young ones fall ill or get injured, and die, there is nothing in the world she could do to apologize for the ones she couldn’t help.

This moment of pause, and lack of attention to the surrounding crowd has led her to either the worst, or the best luck, she’s not sure which yet. 

As when she looks up she sees two familiar figures, only one of which has seen her. 

Jaune and Ren are off in the distance, both different as time tends to make a person, but distinctly recognizable still. 

Jaune saw her, he’s staring and pale and she runs and dives into a sea of people in an instant. She loses not only them, but also the dog in the crowd. 

She’s less worried about losing the dog, he has a skill for finding his way back from anywhere. She’s more worried about losing sight of perhaps her only chance to find where the group is staying.

As much as instinct tells her to run, she resists it to go back, much more careful to stay hidden this time. The two are still standing where they had been, now with Ren seemingly trying to guide Jaune away from there, and Jaune looking somehow even paler and definitely not okay.

It takes Ruby a while to connect that back to herself. 

Without frequent reminders, she easily forgets she’s real in any meaningful way. 

Jaune had seen her, and in his mind he quite literally saw a ghost.

It takes her even longer, standing there watching, to connect why that would be so upsetting to him. She knows about losing a friend, knows she should know the feeling, remember the feeling, but it’s distant, just out of reach. 

On a logical level she can get it, but her mind or her body won’t allow her to remember how it feels. 

She wants to feel it. For once she wants to feel, because if she could remember the feeling she could muster up the ability to feel some amount of guilt for seeing Ren comfort a panicked Jaune. Guilt might be punishment enough, but she doesn’t feel that, she doesn’t feel anything, justifies it even: the only thing she ever stole away from them was her presence. She owed them nothing for that. 

She waits, and watches, and waits some more until they finally move, then she follows. 

They lead her exactly where she’d been hoping they would. An old brick house, in the residential district, where they clearly all were lodging.

It stays a waiting game, to map out when people come and go, and figure out where each person’s room is. 

The dog finds her again, trotting right up to where she’s hiding and happily sitting next to her. For the first time in four years she sees her teammates and friends, all at a far distance but she still sees them. 

From the glimpses she gets they seem to be doing fine, happy even, in moments.

If she could be anything right now, she thinks she would be glad, she never did want them to suffer for her absence after all. 

When finally she spots Oscar as he’s headed inside, she grows impatient but forces herself to stay in hiding. 

The dog, however, doesn’t seem so inclined to stay back when he spots someone he likes and recognizes. She tries- and fails to stop him, left sinking even deeper into hiding, swearing under her breath. 

Oscar recognizes the dog, bounding over to him, tail wagging. He’s confused, frowning, but automatically pets him even while giving a sweeping look around. “Are you here by yourself?” He asks, getting only a wet tongue licking his hand in reply. “Okay… don’t know if that’s a no or a yes, so I guess I’ll take that as a yes?” He opens the door and the dog doesn’t follow but doesn’t leave either, just sits on the porch like it’s taken up guard there. 

The wait was still not over, now there’s the wait until Oscar leaves the house again, because going inside is too big of a risk. 

She hunkers down. 

It’s much warmer in the city than in the wilds, the cracked concrete seems to hold heat.

It’s warmer but the air feels thick and hard to breathe, filled with too many overwhelming and unpleasant scents. Too many noises too, and people. 

Crowds made her anxious, more anxious than they used to. If she hadn’t had a goal in mind earlier, it would have been much harder to suppress the urge to attack anyone who accidentally bumped into or brushed against her. 

People come and go from the house. 

Blake startles at the dog still standing guard, who doesn’t move an inch at the hissing yelp she makes.

Oscar leaves again and Ruby pulls herself to her feet, wincing at how stiff her legs had gotten while sitting there. She follows him a ways, making sure no one else they knew was around, and they weren’t, save for the canine who was much more obviously following Oscar. On a quieter street, she lets herself be seen. 

His step stutters, then stops, he doesn’t make much of an expression either, guarded.

He looks down at the dog, “Guess you’re not here alone after all.” 

Then back up at Ruby. “And I guess Jaune wasn’t hallucinating this time. Thought that might be the case, what he described, that sounded like you. I wanted to tell him that but…well, I don’t know,” He shrugs. 

There are questions she almost asks then, but they aren’t the questions she’s here to ask, so she stops herself. The growing silence makes the neutrality on his face meld into concern. “Are you okay?” 

“I need you to take me to the farm- your home,” Ruby gets the words out finally, with an intensity in her gaze that might have frightened him, long ago. 

He wants to ask why.

No he doesn’t. 

Not yet, why is not a question he wants the answer to quite yet. 

He wants to be mad- he is, somewhere in there, but it’s buried beneath a heavy layer of relief and that buzzing that felt halfway between joy and anxiety that always grows stronger the nearer she is. 

He’s helpless still, in many ways, to say no to her. “Okay… alright, but I can’t just leave for that long without warning, that’ll get everyone freaked out.” The intensity of her gaze eases a bit, and the corners of her lips curl up. 

“Thank you.” She rises to her toes to give him a briefest of kisses, unsure of how it’ll be received now, all things considered. 

“You know, you only ever do that when you’re thanking me for something,” He notes and she blinks at him. She hadn’t quite expected him to pick up the pattern, but then again she’d been treating those fleeting kisses as transactional since the very beginning.

“Yeah, and you always blush when I do. So what?” She responds after a pause.

“So, nothing I guess. Listen, I’ve got to go but I’ll come up with some excuse for them and we can leave tomorrow?” One part of him can’t believe he’s planning to do this, the other part knew he would. “I’m assuming you know where I’m staying, since he was hanging by the door all day?” Oscar gestures towards the dog.

“Yeah, I do. I’ll see you tomorrow then, and thank you again- I won’t kiss you again for it since you seem to want to call me out for it.” 

“See you then.” 

* * *

  
  


The next day brings them meeting not far from the house. 

The train station being halfway across the city seems like nothing to someone that’s used to traversing much more challenging terrain. 

When they get there, they are stopped by a very polite and slightly weary worker who reminds them that no animals are allowed to board without a leash. 

Finding something that’s suitable for a leash is less of an issue than convincing a dog whose never once worn on to tolerate it. 

It’s a sight to see, Ruby trying to get that beast to sit still, talking to him like he understood a word of it, threatening to leave him at the station. 

Eventually they get on a train with a sulking dog who lays at Ruby’s feet with a loud huff, making his objections known. 

The first hour goes by fine, quickly even. 

They fall into one of their usual debates, this time over the merits of different projectile weapons. It is a debate Oscar never is going to win. 

He knows this from the beginning but it’s nice to see Ruby slip into talking so passionately about anything.

Conversation tapers off. 

The second hour finds Ruby fidgeting with one of pamphlets that show different train routes. The fidgeting turns into ripping until she has a pile of pamphlet confetti in her lap.

The third hour, and she can’t sit still any longer. 

She stands, tiny pieces of paper flutter to the ground and land on the dog like snow. 

She’ll clean it up later, she can’t stay still.

She paces the length of the train, passing by all the other passenger compartments, and gets all the way to the cafe before turning around to walk the length again. 

The rumbling under her feet of the wheels, that reminder that she’s already in motion, doesn’t do anything to ground her. 

Oscar is at a loss for what to do, at first. 

Their normal means of distraction would definitely disturb other people. 

Still, as Ruby passes by for a fourth time, he sees that wild look in her eyes and can’t just let her stay like that. 

He grabs her wrist to stop her. 

She breaks his grip easily, her own nails digging into his arm, readying to attack. 

She catches herself, barely, before she pounces. This isn’t the place, or the time. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” He asks, trying to ease her back, not minding the painful grip she had on him.   
  


She stares, searching for words, trying to remember how to speak. “Small spaces. People. Hate it.” She lets him guide her back to their seats.  


It’s nothing new. She has always the one to retreat first, with the excuse of wanting to read comics, or wanting to get to sleep, or patrolling. It was easy to go unnoticed, with how energetic she used to be.   
  


“Okay…” Oscar looks around, searching for any answer. The dog whines and his eyes fall on it. “If you were going to name him, what would it be?”   
  


“I don’t know, haven’t thought about it. Nothing too impressive, he’s a total pest, doesn’t deserve anything too majestic,”   
  


“He doesn’t seem that bad. How about Ash?” He was more or less picking a name at random, trying to keep her talking.   
  


“No way, that’s too nice, too dignified.” Ruby shakes her head.   
  


“Fine, if we’re going for undignified, how about Cookie?” The dog looked up like he was actually judging Oscar for that one.  
  


“No way, that’s way too good, and too sweet. I like the food names though, go on.”  
  


“Potato?” Oscar throws out there, he’s really just picking out of thin air.   
  


“Okay, see that’s more like it. That’s what you are, huh, a big potato.” She pats the dog, who flops on his side like he’s accepted his fate of a terrible name. “So I guess that’s your answer, I’d name him Potato.” 

Distracting worked, she’s able to sit still and breathe freely, for a while at least.  
  
  


When again the walls of the train start to feel as if they’re bending inward to crush her, she’s the first to speak this time. 

“Do you have any photos of your aunt, or your family?” She asks like it’s just a passing thought, a random curiosity.   
  


“I do actually. I found it, when I went back and found everything… well, how it was.” He rustles through the small leather bag he’s brought with him to pull out a folded picture.   
  


It’s faded, and the corner is bent, but the image is clear. He looks a fair bit like his aunt, freckles and all. The resemblance stands out even clearer since Oscar’s in the photo too, young and grinning, one front tooth missing. 

“You were so little.” Ruby hums, trying and failing not to laugh. “It’s cute.”   
  


“Yeah, laugh it up. I’ve been to Patch, remember? I’ve seen pictures of little you too.” Oscar grumbles, looking away.   
  


“Why were you in Patch anyways?” She’d forgotten about that entirely until now.   
  


He almost begins to answer before shaking his head. “Nope, my turn to ask a question.” 

“Oh, we’re taking turns now? Okay.” She’s willing to go with it. 

It’s a familiar game of give and take. They’ve been playing it from the beginning, and the stakes are once again changed. There is no running, and there is no fighting to dodge an unwanted question, there is instead just silence and an understanding that silence was sometimes the only answer they had to give. 

There’s long lulls between questions. They’re content in silence until they aren’t, and the game continues. 

When evening approaches and one of those long stretches of silence lends itself to sleep, Ruby quickly and quietly takes that picture and carefully tucks it into her own pocket, whispering an apology under her breath. He would get it back, sooner or later. She was simply borrowing it. 

  
  


* * *

“Think you’ll ever have kids?” She most certainly waited until he was mid sip of water to take her turn asking the first question that morning. 

Oscar coughs, and sputters, catching his breath before answering. “I think I want to make it to twenty before I think about that.” 

“Well, you’re almost there, made it this far.” 

“Mm, but even then. I don’t know, if I die, it’s weird you know?” 

Ruby tilts her head, it’s not her turn to ask another question, so she waits to see if he has more to say. 

“If I die, I don’t really get to be gone, so it’s… uncomfortable, knowing I’d be leaving anyone behind, but also still be around, but also not really, not as me,” He has no eloquent way to describe the dread of it, and thinking about it lets that all seep back in. He shakes his head. “Think you ever will? Have kids, that is.”

“Asking the same question is definitely cheating, but okay. Nope, not gonna.” 

Her answer is so succinct that Oscar mirrors Ruby’s previous motion and tilts his head to silently ask for her to go on. 

“I don’t really want to pass on a trait that will get them hunted for sport.” She points to her eyes. “And, well, enough kids starve, or freeze, or get killed by Grimm because no one cares already,” It would just sound pessimistic coming from anyone else, but it’s said so factually that it only makes him wonder more at all she has seen and been through. 

* * *

  
  


The closer they get to their destination, the more questions slip out that they’ve both bitten back for so long. As hard as the questions might have once been to ask, they all seemed easy to answer. 

They deboard the train at the nearest stop. It no longer stops at the town nearest the farm. No one needs that stop anymore. 

_ “Do you believe me when I say you’re your own person?” She asks.  _

_ “Yes.” Simple as can be to answer.  _

Her eyes gloss over, she looks so distant as they approach the town. 

_ “Do you miss everyone?” He asks. _

_ The question doesn’t pull her back.  _

_ “Yes.” A distracted, detached whisper as her eyes trace the burnt and damaged buildings.  _

She snaps back to reality, not fully, but enough to remember to ask a question. 

_ “Why did you keep meeting with me?”  _

Silence is what that question is met with. 

There’s a ghost of an expression on Oscar’s face that makes her blood run cold. 

Silence is as fair an answer as any. 

Only wind and the padding run of the dog- now free of the leash- keeps it from being completely quiet. 

He has his next question for her. 

It’s a question that’s rested on his patient tongue since serendipity or cruel fate sought to bring them together again. 

He has the question, but he’s still not ready to bring it to light. 

He swallows it down once more as they approach the farm, now overgrown with brambles and wild grass. 

He swallows the question down again, and again, and again, because he doesn’t want to know, not really. 

Denial had been a good friend to him. 

Yet it turns bitter, it burns, it’s going to turn his insides to charcoal. 

This feeling answers another question he was never brave enough to ask. 

He understands now, as much as he can understand it anyways, the feeling that drove Ruby to kiss him that first time, with such wild aggression. 

He understands, only as she sits in the grass with him, with the calmest, clearest expression he’s seen from her. 

It only burns him worse. 

She leans in, until their foreheads are near touching. She’s counting the specks of brown, and orange, and gold in his eyes. 

He’s begging without words for her not to say anything yet.  _ ‘I’m not ready yet.’  _ His eyes say. 

She nods, she will wait until he asks. 

She presses a gentle kiss to his lips, and he understands what feeling drove her that first time, because he desperately wants the same now. 

For once he initiates, sure he’s teased and goaded before, and sure she has just kissed him first but for the first time he’s the one trying to chase off some terrible and wild feeling. 

She draws him in and fights him all at once. It’s never about fighting to get away, if that were the case then neither would do this. It’s always about fighting for control, over the other, over themselves. Usually it’s more Ruby’s fight than his own, he’s been happily caught in that hurricane time and time again. This time it’s more his fight, or it’s equal. 

The taste of blood and this particular variety of pain he’s come to completely associate with these moments. It’s not unpleasant, it makes him shiver. 

This would all be so much easier if pain was just pain and nothing more to either of them.

He’s crying, and he doesn’t realize it until that salty taste mixes with everything else. 

They both ignore that. They both fight until there’s no fight left in them. 

When they do pull apart, an offer spills from his lips.“You could come back.” His voice cracks,  _ ‘we could still pretend this none of this happened.’ _

“Please.” She closes her eyes. “Just ask, already.” 

She knows the question he’s going to ask, she’s that very same question before to see how it felt.

She knows her answer, she’s rehearsed it in her head since the moment she decided to burn this bridge and go back to the tribe. 

“Why did you leave?” There it was, hanging in the air where they couldn’t ignore it any longer. 

She opens her eyes and forces him to look at her as she answers, as if he could possibly look away.

“I killed Ironwood. Then I ran. Why? I don’t know. Because I kept imagining what everyone would think? Or because I couldn’t stand another day of being me? I don’t know.”

She ignores the tears running down his face.

“I joined Raven and… I did this!” She waves an arm at all that surrounds them. “I did this to so many different places.” She could stop there, it’s enough. She doesn’t, she wants to leave him no room to excuse her. 

She looks him in the eyes. “I kill huntsmen. I think they deserve it. I don’t feel bad about it. I kill them slowly, and painfully, and I don’t regret it.” 

There’s silence.

She stands. “You can tell them I’m alive, if you want. Just don’t leave any of that out, if you do.” 

She doesn’t run this time.

She walks slowly. 

He doesn’t stop her. 

The dog doesn’t follow her either. 

She leaves alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I really just end with her leaving him two chapters in a row? Yup.


	16. Peace, Beasts, and Monsters

Alone she continues to wander.  
Not yet ready to return to the tribe, not with this hollow feeling in her chest, not when she still has even a vague goal in mind.

She keeps the photo she’d ‘borrowed’ from Oscar held close, kept safe. Every place she passes through briefly, she brings the picture out, asks if anyone has seen the women in it.  
  
It’s ridiculous to hope, and it’s no surprise that she’s always met with head shakes and polite apologies.

There is a real chance that Oscar’s aunt was alive, most in the tribe didn’t kill those who ran, only those who fought or those who wouldn’t otherwise survive. The farm hadn’t been raided, just abandoned. She might be alive but with no leads, there was very little chance of finding her.

With each place she goes, each dead end, she slows a little more.  
  
The days stretch.  
They stretch until they’re so thin that the colors, tastes, and smells all dull to a murky, jumbled palette.  
  
Some days she wakes then shuts her eyes again just minutes later to drift off again.  
She still has that hopeless little goal, without that she isn’t all too sure she would bother to keep traveling at all.

She has always been moving forward, she realizes.  
This whole time, even when she had thought going to the tribe meant giving up, she had still been moving forward.  
Forward was just whatever direction is in front of her.

She doesn’t stop moving, after that realization.  
Instead, she stops checking her peripherals.  
She stops ensuring her weapon is loaded at all times.  
She stops wearing her mask in crowds.

She goes three days without eating, and doesn’t realize it until she begins to shake and finally feel the clawing at her stomach.  
  
Her first attempt to feed herself after that only results in it being heaved back up soon after as if her body has forgotten what to do with food.  
It’s a pattern that repeats itself on more than one occasion.  
  
Raven’s old lessons of survival are lost on her now.

She is caught once, while in the middle of one of these cycles.  
Not physically caught, and not by anyone with ill intentions.  
  
With little energy to bother hunting or foraging, she finds the nearest settlement and gets the cheapest soup in the one quaint restaurant in town.  
  
This time she sincerely has no idea how long it was since she last ate.  
That combined with the speed she drank the soup it was no surprise she ended up throwing up in the alley next to the building.  
  
An older woman with a kind face and a bright yellow floral dress that hurts Ruby’s eyes to look at is standing there waiting for Ruby to notice her.  
Words are exchanged but Ruby has no idea what she’s even said, niceties emerge from her lips automatically in a voice that’s damaged from bile.  
  
All she knows is she ends up back in the restaurant with a cup of tea in front of her.

She blinks a couple times, realizing she’s being spoken to again, by the lady who was now sitting across from her with a patient look.

“I’m sorry, what?” She mumbles.

“I said to drink up girly, this is easy on the stomach I promise.”

“Oh, right, thanks,” She takes the smallest sip she can, it tastes no different than most any other tea does to her, which is to say not amazing but her stomach doesn’t lurch this time.

“Seems you’re having a rough day about it,” The woman comments.  
Ruby has learned how to do the meaningless small talk in towns, to get information, but she is far from in the mood for it so she just shrugs.  
  
“Hmm, and what brings a pretty young woman such as yourself doing around here?” 

It’s odd, pretty isn’t a word she’d attribute to herself at this point, less so than she ever would have.  
Ruby’s doubtful it’s sincere even, after days without proper sleep or food she must have looked like a mess.

“Nothing, I guess,” She shrugs a second time.  
There’s something in the lady’s expression, this expectation of more and this slight sternness.  
“I was looking for someone, but it doesn’t matter.” The words slip out without her permission.

“Looking for who, then? And drink more.”

Ruby takes another small sip, pulling out the photo, the one thing she still keeps carefully stored. She still plans to get it back to Oscar somehow, eventually. “The woman, specifically.”

Her eyes fall on the picture. She tilts her head.  
  
When she looks back up at Ruby, there’s a glint in her eyes. “You might not think it, but fates are in your favor, girl. Believe she was headed to Fenas, when she passed through. Was a while past, but she meant to settle there. That’s a few days walk south of here, if you hussle.”

It’s all too coincidental, Ruby didn’t believe it fully.  
Still there’s this slight relief, of the chance that time hadn’t been entirely wasted.  
  
“Thank you,” She sits quietly, slowly finishing the tea to appease the woman who kept her attention with idle town gossip.

She has a lead now, a new direction to go, onward and forward yet again.  
An hour out of the little settlement, south towards Fenas, Ruby slows to a stop.  
  
She stares ahead, then turns on her heels, off onto an entirely different and unknown path.

Next time she has a pen, she scribbles the name of the town on the back of the photo, hides it away again, and tries to forget all about it. She doesn’t want to know.

Aimless now, truly and utterly aimless she keeps moving for no other reason than but restless energy that flows through her and makes her muscles ache if she stays still for too long.

* * *

A monster catches the scent of a beast, and she is not safe.  
She never was anyways. She doesn’t care.

* * *

It is this careless, goalless wandering that she finds something else before she herself is found.

Alone she finds that pervasive terrible feeling finally being soothed without her noticing.  
Not alone, though, not really.  
Alone is where she finds her bloodlust waning.  
  
It is only when she begins to linger around strangers, taking odd jobs, and staying in towns for more than a night does she start to learn what the space between or beyond numb and furious feels like.

In a dark and bleak world, there were still those who shone brightly.  
Not always out of ignorance and innocence, but out of stubbornness too, out of spite for that darkness- or out of love for the light.

In one town, a little boy dashes up to her and wordlessly hands her a white rose.  
He points to the faded and scratched emblem she still wears at her hip.  
  
She doesn’t understand his reasoning really, but thanks him with a not all too forced smile.  
  
She learns later, talking to others around, that he has no one home to speak of.  
He watched his parents killed in front of him and now the whole town parents him, in different ways.  
Some with food, or shelter, others with lessons taught with gentle words or harsh scoldings.  
  
He doesn’t speak much, especially not to strangers, but each and every one of the villagers say he’s always aimed to make people smile.

Then there’s an older man, in a smaller settlement, who at first thinks her to be a huntress and offers her lien to protect the town.  
He walks in a hobbling way with a crutch, missing one leg and the other leg full of inflammation at every joint.  
  
Prosthetics are expensive and certainly hard to come by this far out from the cities.  
  
When she turns down his money, he gives a sad smile and talks to her.  
  
He knows everyone in the settlement so well, he knows their troubles, their favorite foods, their children’s first words, he is their guardian and he speaks of every one of them with deep pride.  
  
She refuses his money, but goes hunting that night all the same.  
The settlement will be free of Grimm, for a bit longer at least.

There’s a baker family who had owned the same business in the same building for many generations.  
  
Ruby has not offered them anything when they learn this odd stranger knows next to nothing about baking.  
They wholeheartedly insist on teaching her the basics after she clears the area of.  
  
She has a small recipe book among her possessions now with the instructions for sourdough bread, scones, and several different types of cookies.  
Rarely does she have access to a kitchen to bake, but she’ll never forget how to make those things even so.  
  
  


There is a man who watches over his sickly, wrinkly, elderly mother.  
She is known to wander away in confusion frequently, and cries out in pain at night, howling so loud it can be heard from a distance.  
  
In moments of clarity, that old woman weaves beautiful half finished scarves and shawls.  
In her worst moments she lashes out at her adult son who does all he can to care for her.  
  
Ruby picks herbs for them, familiar ones she has had to use more times than she wants to think about.  
She leaves the man with two different pouches, one that might ease his mother’s pain for small bouts of time, and the other that will give her a peaceful and endless sleep.  
  
It is their choice to make,  
perhaps they have more happy moments to share before that choice is made,  
or perhaps tonight is the old woman’s last.  
  
Ruby doesn’t stay to find out.

There’s a rotund orange cat perching on a log outside a cabin Ruby is passing by.  
  
There are many cats around actually, but this particular one sees it as his duty to hop down and disappear inside the cabin, summoning the occupant.  
  
A very pregnant woman with bright blue eyes and curly hair pokes her head out in greeting.  
  
Ruby expects it to be a friendly passing wave until the woman sees her scythe and gasps.  
“Did you build that yourself?” The stranger asks. 

It had always been a rarity to have someone other than children be so genuinely intrigued with her weapon.  
  
It brought a familiar but long forgotten look of pride to her face as she nodded, willingly extending the weapon to be seen. “I did, I mean I haven’t made any modifications to it in forever, but I did build it.”

“What do you use to reinforce the chamber? It’s dust compatible right, so it has to be something pretty sturdy that doesn’t cause the dust to activate prematurely. I would say regular steel but that conducts heat too well...” The woman stops herself then, looking up sheepishly.  
“Oh sorry, that was rude. I haven’t even introduced myself. It’s just that I own a blacksmithing and weapon’s shop, my husband is looking after it for now, because, well.” She gestures to her stomach.  
“I’m a little stir-crazy I guess. Anyways, I’m Cypress, and what I was trying to say was- you have a very interesting weapon.”

Ruby laughs quietly. “It’s okay. You don’t need to explain. I used to say I liked weapons better than people which… might still be true.” She shrugs.  
  
Conversation comes much more easily now, not just because of the topic, but because of practice.  
She still habitually avoids offering her name, and still has been given various names throughout the places she wanders.  
  
“There’s a layer of thermal resistant plastic on the inside, it took some adjusting to be able to handle more than one type of dust cartridge. I usually use regular bullets anyway, it's hard to get dust while traveling.”

“Would you like to come inside for a bit? I’ve got plenty of other questions if you have a little time to spare.”

The thing about wandering is, she has all the time in the world to spare now.  
  
Ruby nods, following the woman inside where even more cats were lazing about, watching from all corners of the room.  
  
Hours pass rapidly. Most conversations Ruby has involve her listening far more than speaking, but given a topic she loves so deeply that reveals little about herself, she participates fully. Her throat is dry from the unusual amount of talking when the front door opens and in comes a lanky man with mouse ears, a faunus.  
  
A few of the cats hop down from their perches to meet him with demanding meows.  
He looks first at his wife.  
“Hi honey,” He greets, adoration shining in his eyes before he notices the guest. “Who’s this?”  
  
“This is…” The woman pauses, but Ruby doesn’t offer up an interjection. “A new friend! She built her own weapon, we were just chatting about that but wow I guess time sure flew quickly.”

The man chuckles, waving at Ruby as he goes to get the cats their dinner. “I thought we were just sticking to bringing in stray cats, not stray humans too.” He teased. “But hi, I’m Mish.”

It occurs to Ruby that this couple was young, probably not far off from her own age at all. She knows little about them they seem so happy and full of love, so sure of the life they have carved out together.  
They are so sure of a good future that they even are expecting a child together.

She’s tuned out, caught in her own thoughts.

“She knows her way around weapons and materials, Mish, she’d be great help at the shop.” The woman blurted out.

Ruby only caught the last part of what was said, and her confusion must show on her face because the man laughs again.

“I was joking about taking her in like a stray, you have to at least ask her first you know?” He reminds her.

“Oh! Right, sorry. Anyways would you be interested in helping out there? My husband is great, but it’s a lot of work to do and I can’t get back out there until I have this baby. We’ll pay you, of course, and if you want you can stay here in the guest room.”

That is how Ruby spent three weeks working in a blacksmith's shop.  
It is hard work, but it keeps her occupied and it’s something she knows a bit about.  
  
She leaves one evening, before the couple’s child is born, with well wishes and an open invitation to come back any time.

They never did learn her name.

She leaves there with another decision made. Being a wanderer suits her.

She has found not purpose or peace, but a calmness without numbness.

That is more than enough, more than she deserves.  
More than she deserves and fate knows it.  
  
Not more than three days later,  
the monster closes in on the beast.

Enemies of the past are so distant, they are enemies of a person she no longer is.  
It makes no difference.

Cinder is one of the last people Ruby expects to ever see again.  
So when Cinder confidently approaches her in the outskirts of a ruined town, Ruby doesn’t react immediately.  
  


Reflexes kick in eventually though.  
Fleeing gives her better chances of survival than fighting might.  
  
Ruby can fight dirty now, can fight remarkably well, but Cinder has Maiden’s powers.  
So in a burst of petals Ruby is off, or she would be if she hadn’t waited too long, if Cinder hadn’t already gotten the jump on her and stopped her physically with the full force of her body.

If fleeing isn’t an option, then fighting is all she has.  
  
Well, not all she has.  
She has her eyes too, but time is not on her side to activate them.  
  
So she fights, scythe, tooth, and nail.  
  
It’s taking too long, Cinder is toying with her.  
  
If she wants Ruby dead, it could have been done already.  
  
Cinder sees that realization in Ruby’s eyes and grins, bloodlust with not a trace of humanity left.  
  
If she’s going to take her time, then Ruby has time too.  
  
She tunes into the rhythm of the fight, until her body can react on it’s own.  
Mentally she’s a mile away, in a mediation of sorts.  
  
Happy thoughts, love, protecting others, preserving life.  
  
There used to be a time her eyes would activate just looking at Cinder, just her innate need to protect her friends kicking in.  
Here she has no one to save but herself.

Happy thoughts.  
She sees a life flash before her eyes, not the one she’s lived, but one that might have been.

_Raven never comes to her. She goes back to her teammates and family after killing Ironwood, she tells them all that happened._  
  
_They hug her._  
_They understand- no they don’t, but they love her and that’s supposed to be enough._  
  
_Life goes on and they probably never speak of it again._

_Yang might confess her crush to Blake, it goes well. Someday not far in this different future, Ruby has a sister-in-law._

_Weiss plans for how to repair the damage her family has done, even as the world is still in peril. She stays one of Ruby’s best friends through it all._

_Ren and Nora would be the unbreakable force they’ve always been together. One day they become amazing parents._

_Jaune grows to be a better leader than he will ever know. Later he teaches huntsman skills to teenagers who decided their path later than most and never attended combat school before._

_She gets to have a girl’s night with Penny finally. Neither of them really knows what that means even now, so they spend it playing games._

_Uncle Qrow stays sober- or maybe he slips up a couple of times, in dark moments, but he always stands back up. Ruby gets to tell him how proud of him she is._  
_She gets to see her dad again too. He fusses, and dotes, and cries._

_In this life, she learns about Oscar more slowly, in happy, painless moments. With all his gift to see the beast inside her lurking below the surface and still accept her, he is more than willing to listen to her._

_But in this life she isn’t willing to tell, and even less willing to show._

_Because she is happy._  
_She is supposed to be happy._  
_But she’s not._  
_She’s treading water, barely staying afloat._

Reality sinks back in, that isn’t where she is.  
And maybe it isn’t where she belongs either.

She is fighting Cinder and she needs to think of something happy.  
A memory maybe.  
  
The memory of her first discovering her semblance. Uncle Qrow cheered her.  
  
The memory of building a blanket fort with Yang, eating half melted popsicles.

A melody, a memory so distant and hard to place it sounded like she was hearing it through water. A melody that made her feel warm and safe.

It was enough, just enough.  
The world goes white as her eyes shine.

It’s not enough.  
The world goes black as she falls to the ground.

She wakes not more than a handful of minutes later.  
Still alive, but bound up with something unyielding.

“Do you know how much I want to cut those eyes out of your skull right now?” Cinder asks as Ruby stirs.  
She’s brandishing a blade, bringing it down to just barely slice Ruby’s cheek.  
Blood wets her face and the cut burns. It burns unnaturally, it hurts more than it should and her aura isn’t healing it as fast as it should either.  
“But, I think I want to see the pain in your eyes before I take care of them. I borrowed a little venom from that annoying scorpion, let’s see what it can do.”

If Ruby could see the blood trickling down her chin, she’d see the way it began to turn purple rather than rusty brown as it should.  
Her head is still fuzzy from using her eyes but she uses what mobility she still has to make things difficult.  
  
“Hold still.” Cinder chides, the cut she makes would have been quite shallow if it weren’t for Ruby’s squirming.  
  
Eventually Ruby obliges for lack of any other choice, and in an effort to focus to use her eyes again.  
  
Cinder traces the pale blue of the veins in Ruby’s hands and arms with the tip of the blade.

Ruby waits too long, she doesn’t have the energy she needs.  
  
This venom is trickling in with the crawling feeling of a thousand fire ants under her skin.

A monster plays with its prey.  
Cinder leaves her like that for a bit, thoroughly confident she has won.  
She will get to see Ruby dead, but first she gets to see her suffer.

A beast never goes down willingly.  
She is back to struggling with every bit of energy she has, she will go down fighting.  
  
Time has less meaning than it ever has before.  
Ruby makes no sounds, for as long as she can manage not to.  
  
Eventually the reality of the blade tracing patterns on her, and Cinder’s addition of using her maiden powers to singe close any too-deep cuts blurs into hallucinations which blurs into this hazy nothingness.

Her breaths are shallow and rapid.  
She can’t open her eyes but maybe that’s for the best.  
She is fighting her own body now more than she is fighting Cinder.  
She doesn’t know why she’s still fighting it.  
  
A beast does not bow to a monster so willingly.  
  
Time moves strangely with no point of reference she can focus on.  
  


A few things happen in rapid succession.  
  
A noise like fabric tearing.  
A knife plunged into her abdomen, then twisted.  
Flashing lights, the metallic sound of weapon’s hitting each other.  
  
A fight, Ruby realizes right before her last sliver of consciousness bleeds out.


	17. The Ties that Bind

Raven is covered in blood.    
It isn’t hers.

It’s still warm as it soaks her clothes and flows down her forearms in streams, down the whole length of her body. Some is a healthy deep red, but the rest of it is a dulled purple that coagulates into a near gel consistency by the time it reaches the ground. 

All of that blood comes from the girl held in her arms, 

Raven isn’t injured, yet for a breath she is frozen in pain.    
  


As much as her brother lamented his own unfortunate semblance, she still thought her own to be worse.

Love and trust cost her a heavier price than most. 

The tether that allowed her to find her bonded was an invisible rope that tied her very being to theirs. Danger and injury pulled at that tether, warning her with the sensation of her very viscera being ripped through. 

Death was... the sensation of one of her bonded dying was reason enough to _ never  _ want to take that chance again.    
  
Her mistake to try again.    
It left her with a dying girl in her arms and that familiar sickening pain seeping in.

It would be a mercy to end it.   
It would relieve her own misery to end it.    
  


Yet she doesn’t.    
Because… 

This isn’t the first time she held a bleeding Rose.

Summer was a reckless fool with no sense of self preservation despite her own importance.    
Raven had held this girl’s mother similarly countless times. Circumstances were usually less dire those times but that made it no less memorable.    
  
Summer was reckless and Raven wanted to hate her for that.   
Ruby though- Ruby was strong. Raven made sure of that and yet what good did that do in the end?   
If Ruby dies now it is an inevitability that Raven couldn’t prevent with teaching strength.    
She is already far too acutely aware of inevitabilities.    
That there will always be suffering, always be those who are weak and those who are strong.   
That the world is, in the end, doomed.    
  
There is so very little she has control over and if she couldn’t even stop this then she has even less than she thought.    


She is holding a dying girl and she can’t do the right thing.   
Because…    
  
This wasn’t the first time she held Ruby.

Even though the girl would never remember either occasion. 

* * *

It was a hot, humid night when Summer sat outside holding a sleeping bundle.

She could feel eyes on her, a feeling she was plenty familiar with. Her eyes slid up to the tree branches, to a black bird that nearly melded into the darkness.    
“You could come down here, you know.” She let those words hang in the air long enough that she was nearly sure that invitation wouldn’t be met.

A rush of wind and the figure standing in front of her proved her wrong. “You can come closer, I’m not going to fight, I don’t even have my weapon on me.” She smiled, open and friendly in a way that she knew upset Raven, maybe that’s why she did it. 

Raven for her part took a step forward, rising to the challenge compulsively. 

She stared at the child in Summer’s arms.    
Silence between them hung thickly until the sound of crickets in the distance grew to a deafening crescendo.

“Want to hold her?” Summer offered,    
Raven took a half step back, a glare masked how startled she had been. She stared Summer down. Why would Summer allow her to hold this child when she had only held her own daughter all of three times in total before it all became too much. 

Bonds were always a burden but bearing a child showed her just how awful it really could be. Even then, when Yang was a toddler, Raven couldn’t manage to stray far for long without the tug of that bond becoming unbearable.    
It was what kept her lingering in Patch at all.    
She wanted to want nothing to do with any of them, and yet she never was allowed that. 

In that odd way Summer always seemed to be able to do, she responded to words unsaid. 

  
“You’re not going to bond with her from holding her for a few minutes. Come on, what do you have to be scared of?”    
  


Raven bristled at that insinuation. There had never been any winning with Summer, she knew exactly what to say and she would say it with a sweet smile that would make even the most paranoid of men doubt that she had any ulterior motives. If she had no other powers, she would always have that unnerving charm.    
  
“Fine, hand it over. If I drop the kid it’s your own fault.” Raven perched at the edge of the bench.    
Ruby was barely disturbed by being passed to a stranger, her eyes fluttering open just long enough for Raven to those bright familiar silver eyes.    
Raven sighed, but said nothing, comment was unnecessary.    
  


“It was wishful thinking, I know, but I hoped…” Summer trailed off, smiling- always smiling despite that warble of barely held emotion in her voice. Raven often wondered if Summer knew how to do anything but smile.   
  
“I hoped- hope, she would have an easy life.” She finally finished. A life with these eyes would never be so easy.   
  
“You can hope that she grows up strong.” Raven offered some small solace. 

  
“She shouldn’t have to!” Summer nearly interrupted her, a rare fire in her voice, a waver in her expression. It lasted only a blink before she repeated herself more softly, like the world may burn if she let her own fear and fury show even for a moment. “She shouldn’t have to… no one should.”   
  
“Saying that changes nothing.” Raven countered. “You can say that all you like but you can’t will a peaceful world into existence, it doesn’t work like that. The world isn’t fair, if I wasn’t strong I’d be dead. If she isn’t strong, she’ll die too.” She gave Summer no chance to respond, passing the child back to her arms and disappearing into the night once again.    
  


* * *

  
  


Now, Raven is still holding this dying girl.    
She doesn’t have much time, and she doesn’t have many options.   
  
  
If she travels on foot, Ruby won’t make it past the mile mark. The fact that her heart is still beating at all is a miracle.   


Which leaves here only one option, rely on her semblance for travel, hope that who she travels to is in a place better suited to getting Ruby care.   
  
She has four living bonds left, one she held right now.    
  
Of those three other options, she calls upon her oldest bond, her brother.   
Regardless of how she felt about Qrow, or what Qrow thought of her now, he was one person she could trust would react to this sensibly- act fast enough to have a chance.   
  
Last she knew of him he was in Kushinashi and while their medical system wasn’t up to Atlas standards it was better than nothing by far.    
  
  
There is no time to brace herself for this, no moment to collect her thoughts and no thoughts to collect before following the invisible strand that wound around her heart and out into the far distance. A mental tug of that strand is what it took to rip open a portal that she steps through.    
  
The sudden warmth and dusty wood smell stands in stark contrast to the cold dampness of her previous location.   
  
She is standing in a house, she notes. How fortunate, there were so many worse places this could have led.    
  
Her brother is holding his weapon at the ready, a reflex he has developed in response to her visits.    
Their eyes meet and the loud clang of Harbinger falling to the floor marks him springing into action.   
  
A fear in his eyes twinning her own.    
  
It is near impossible to tell if Ruby is even alive but Qrow knows that Raven wouldn’t waste her time on delivering a corpse in such a way. Why she would bother delivering a severely injured Ruby back to them after all these years is a question for another time and one Qrow thinks he might not want the answer to. 

Raven doesn’t notice that there are others present at first.    
There is a ringing in her ears that drowns out their gasps and horrified comments.    
As observant as she normally is, she only notices when this blond boy approaches, shaking like a leaf and looking distinctly like he is going to vomit.    
  
“I- I can help? My semblance…” He is struggling to string words together and Raven can hardly argue right now.   
  
It is only then that all the others come into focus too. Most look familiar in so far as she cares to remember faces though she can only name Yang, the Schnee girl, and Ozpin’s new vessel among the crowd.    
  
  
The weight she has been holding is pried away from her grip and her arms feel so light she struggles to let them rest at her sides.    
She has no purpose here now, nothing she does now would change the outcome.    
Though it hasn’t occurred to her to move. Distance would only make the pain of a fraying strand of a dying bond more severe.    
  
  
“What did you _do_?!” Her daughter screeches, barely held back from lunging at her by the faunus girl and one other.    
All the while the others scramble to do what they can to get Ruby help.    
  
Yang, bright and fiery as ever she has been does something Raven couldn’t predict.    
When her protective fury is met with no reply, she tempers that fire and lowers her fists and her voice. She turns on her heels as if Raven wasn’t there and joins everyone to see what she can do.    
  
It has been a long time since Raven has kept tabs on Yang. It stopped just as soon as she brought Ruby into the tribe actually. Years without watching from the trees has left her daughter much more a stranger than ever before.

  
Raven is left standing there without acknowledgement beyond a few suspicious glances.    
  
She knows, eventually, what she will do next but waits until Ruby is carted off to a proper hospital before she makes her move.    
This time she can spare a few moments to think.    
  
Three of her four bonds seen in a day, she might as well complete the set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooof it has been a long time since I've updated- it has been a weird year! No surprise there haha. I don't think I realized how much of a cliffhanger I left it on for a while.   
> Things have settled down for me so I should be back to much more frequent updates.   
> The story will be following Raven for a bit longer, it's been fun and interesting to try and write her.


End file.
